THE MAKING OF DLS
“The whole of Singer is a surprise for Rob and I, as we didn’t really expect for it to ever be a business,” says Mazen ‘Maz’ Fawaz, CEO, Singer Vehicle Design. It’s more than a business, though – Singer really is something of a phenomenon.
Maz and Singer founder, Rob Dickinson, have been friends from the early days, when Dickinson assembled his first cars. “Rob and I were sort of born Porsche lunatics. It’s from birth or something,” says Maz.
The pair clearly work incredibly well together, Maz admitting: “Rob and I share a similar kind of OCD. Maybe in different areas of the car. But it’s a sort of lack of compromise. Rob’s not a guy to say, ‘Yeah, it’s good enough. Let’s send it out.’ He just doesn’t. And I’m very similar on the mechanical side of the car, how the car drives and how it sounds, who’s working on it. It’s very, very difficult to take shortcuts.” It was Maz who steered Dickinson down the 964 route for the classic cars and who was instrumental in their development, as a friend. He eventually joined the company in 2017, becoming CEO in January 2020.
That OCD manifests in Maz’s obsession with weight, it being apparent on Singer’s ‘classic’ reimagined vehicles already, but curiosity got the better of him. “I looked at, at the time, a kit of 25-year-old parts on the ground. And I went, ‘well if you look at all the primary components, some of them trailing
