Just Drive: This Theon Design 911 Isn’t Just Another Hot Rod Porsche

Restomods are big business these days, and hopped-up and modernized Porsche 911s rule the roost with more than a dozen manufacturers competing for your nostalgic big bucks. Sure, re-tweaked Porsche 356s, Land Rover Defenders, Ford Broncos and Mustangs, Toyota Land Cruisers, and even Lamborghini Diablos are all high-ticket things you can buy. But the top-level restomod competition begins with everyboy’s dream sports car, the 911. Theon Design, a small car maker from the U.K.’s motorsports valley, has been building carbon-fiber-bodied 964-generation 911s with potent 4.0-liter air-cooled flat-six engines since 2019. The upshot for us is the fact Theon’s co-founder and designer, Adam Hawley, brought the first U.S. customer car out to Los Angeles and let us have a go with it.

Design First

It would be impossible to write this Theon Design review without mentioning Singer Vehicle Design and its highly desirable “reimagined” 911s. Yes, Singer was the first company to put a hot-rodded Porsche 911 into production and, from the outside looking in, it has been incredibly successful. Singer’s formula is to take a Porsche 964 (the subsequent model after the original G-body 911, produced from 1989 to 1994) and make it look like a café-racer 911 from about 1973. A larger, more powerful engine is installed, and the custom interiors are literal and figurative works of art. Singers are notoriously difficult to purchase, though, and these days the entry-level car will set you back around $900,000. Famously, Singer makes it difficult for journalists to review its cars, so we have no idea how they drive, given that more than 10 years have passed since we sampled one. Credit where credit is due, however: Singer created the fancy, reworked big-ticket 911 market.

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So What?

Why mention Singer? Well, the Theon Design 911 we drove shares the basic elements. All Theon Design 911s began their lives as 964s. The company strips off the body panels and replaces them with carbon-fiber pieces. The resulting shape does bear a resemblance to a Singeresque backdated 911, but look more closely—perhaps you have to look too closely—and you’ll see how Hawley (a former BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Lotus designer) and his team have made a number of subtle changes to the 911’s famous form. Starting up front, there’s more space between the turn signal/running lights and the headlights. The lower lip appears to have a close-trimmed goatee. The wing mirrors are cribbed from the Porsche Speedster Concept while the rear hips are borderline obscene. Speaking of borderline, some of the flourishes might result from OCD, such as the grille, which comprises 11 separate horizonal pieces of aluminum, each one a slightly different length to mimic the shape of a 930 grille. Porsche geeks will drool.

Inside, you’re treated to a mix of leather and carbon fiber. According to Hawley, most of the leather trim pieces in fact cover carbon bits. Indeed, one of Theon Design’s top-level priorities was to keep the weight down, and as such the car drips with carbon-fiber stuff. Theon claims around 660 pounds of weight savings for a “wet weight” of 2,540 pounds, which is incredible if true, considering just how much relatively heavy leather abounds. It’s still remarkable if the claim is off by a couple hundred pounds, which is almost always the case. (We weren’t able to weigh the car ourselves to confirm.) The cabin is nicer than any 964 has a right to be, yet it’s also instantly recognizable as a 911. For instance, you have your classic Butzi Porsche-designed five round gauges, but they are much more premium than stock.

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What Makes Theon Design Different?

The amount of customer involvement in the finished product is the biggest factor separating Theon from the rest of this industry. We spent the day with both Hawley and the car’s Dallas-based owner, Jeff Wilson. Over and over (and over) again, the thrust of the conversation returned to just how involved Wilson was in essentially everything about the car, from his initial trip to Oxfordshire to visit Theon Design HQ to Hawley mailing him paint samples to leave in his driveway under the Texas sun to stare at so he could settle on a color. Along with a number of pretty involved vehicle dynamics changes (Wilson has a racing background), we were struck by how much collaboration had occurred. Theon Design claims each car is built over an 18-month period and involves 6,000 hours of labor, not counting the future owner’s sweat equity.

We asked Wilson why he decided to go with Theon Design over, say, Singer, Gunther Werks, Shark Works, Workshop 5001, or any of the other hot rod Porsche builders we presume he could also afford. “To me, the Theon represents the best of both worlds,” he said. “The analog, smaller car, manual transmission meets light weight, carbon fiber, modern power (405 horsepower), and modern suspension, which translates to one of the best driving experiences I’ve ever had. Theon has built my perfect car through an absolutely amazing build experience and post-delivery relationship.”

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How’s It Drive?

As Wilson mentioned, the most notable attribute about the Theon Design driving experience is how well it splits the difference between old and new. Spend some time in a 1990 Porsche 964, and unless you’re a compete 911 homer, you’ll soon realize the driving experience hardly resembles the modern notion of a sports car; at this point, it’s just an old car. Drive something like the Gunther Werks Turbo, and it’s completely mind blowing in terms of license-revoking performance, but how much of the true Porsche driving experience is left in the thing? Considering how most 993s (like the one it’s based on) drive like La-Z-Boys, we’d argue not much. There’s a tired Goldilocks metaphor here, but the Theon walks the tightrope between old school and new-fangled, getting quite close to the fabled “just right.” Much of the 964 vibe remains, but most of the bad and anachronistic have been tossed overboard.

For example, at high speeds the front end doesn’t get typical-911 light, which means you can attack corners rather than needing to over-slow into them. More important, the Theon doesn’t default to lift-off oversteer, a classic 911 trait, when you come off the throttle. You feel the weight in the back of the car, but Theon engineered its way around the natural limitations of a rear-engine car. Still, while balanced, a nice trail brake into a corner further sharpens the steering; it’s a nice little bit of motorsports behavior in a street car. However, the Theon Design 911 doesn’t track like a race car. By splitting the difference between an old Porsche and a modern track tool, you wind up with a charming, elegant sports car. It’s the type of car you’ll catch yourself daydreaming about while staring at spreadsheets and meeting reminders. Faster 911s exist, but much of what made them 911s is gone as a result.

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Power is plenty without being overwhelming. The engine is a punched-out, air-cooled boxer-six displacing 4.0 liters and matched to a six-speed manual transmission. Theon claims it’s good for 405 horsepower at 7,500 rpm and 324 lb-ft of torque at 5,800 rpm. The 17-inch Michelin Pilot Sport rubber never lost grip under power, though conditions were quite literally ideal. Speaking of ideal, the positive-feeling six-speed gearbox has the perfect ratios for canyon carving. You’ll rarely need gears other than third and fourth, and you can hit triple digits in the latter. So you’ll need to shift more than, say, in an actual modern 911. The last time we checked, the seven-speed manual 992.1 Carrera S could hit 113 mph in third.

The Theon is equipped with a cool little knob at four o’clock below the steering wheel. Since the car is modern with throttle-by-wire, spinning this knob gives you access to four different throttle maps: Normal, Sport, Race, and Race Plus. Sport and Race both feature automatic throttle blipping for downshifts, while Comfort and Race Plus do not. The coolest part? Wilson thought of this feature, and Theon made his idea a reality. And yes, going forward, all Theon 911s can be so optioned.

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There’s a second knob below the Maglock wireless phone charger, and it controls the active dampers. There are five levels of adjustability, moving from softest to firmest. For Angeles Crest Highway, the middle setting was the sweet spot. It provided plenty of body control but still some ability to soak up busted asphalt. That said, the car’s owner informed me he’d love to see an even bigger spread of character between the modes. Meanwhile, there’s also a pull knob that activates an exhaust bypass. When engaged, the Theon makes some absurdly fun sounds, from machine-gun-like overrun to miniature bombs seemingly detonating at random. It’s all gearhead dream stuff.

The Overall Right Idea

Speaking of just for fun, that’s probably the best way to describe the Theon Design 911. Once you get past all the stuff—what’s the motor, how much power, what’s it made from, what’s it cost (starting at $590,000)—and just begin to think about it as a car you can really drive, you realize its true mission: to make car people happy. The Theon Design 911 is not built to be a daily driver, though you could totally go to work five days a week in one. It’s not a track car, nor should it be used that way. Instead, it’s the rare mechanical object that gets you in touch with how much of a good time driving can and should be. Nothing more. If I owned this Midnight Blue beauty, I’d be sure to carve out an hour or two a week to aimlessly go nowhere in particular at all, and that’s more than enough reason to covet it.