Volvo Gets Its Singer Moment: Cyan Racing P1800 GT Reimagines Swedish Icon
By Team Dailyrevs June 16, 2025
Cyan Racing channels its touring car expertise into a restomod Volvo P1800 GT with 420 bhp and under-1000 kg weight.
Positioned as Volvo's answer to Singer's 911, it blends old-school aesthetics with motorsport-grade engineering.
Built-to-order with custom interiors, Holinger manual gearbox, and adjustable suspension for long-distance road focus.
When the Volvo P1800 Goes Grand Touring
The idea of restomodding a Volvo doesn’t always stir the soul. But then again, neither did a backdated Porsche 964 until Singer came along. What Singer is to Porsche, Cyan Racing may now be to Volvo. With the P1800 GT, Cyan isn’t just restoring a 1960s classic—they’re elevating it to a level of craftsmanship, engineering purity, and aesthetic coherence that finally puts Swedish metal in the same rarified conversation as Stuttgart's finest.
The P1800 GT is not a one-size-fits-all affair. Like Singer's process, Cyan takes a donor car—an original Volvo P1800 coupe—and rebuilds it from the ground up, swapping sheet metal for carbon fiber, revising suspension geometry, and dropping in a 2.0-liter four-cylinder turbo that punches out up to 420 bhp. No hybrid trickery, no digital distractions. Just pure, mechanically focused driving, wrapped in a timeless shape.
A Different Kind of Precision
Unlike Singer, which leans heavily into Porsche’s air-cooled past, Cyan brings its World Touring Car Championship DNA to the project. The P1800 GT uses a titanium roll cage integrated into the structure, fully adjustable suspension, and a five-speed Holinger manual—a motorsport-grade transmission that connects the driver directly to the car’s heartbeat.
The weight? Just under 1,000 kg, depending on spec. It’s a purity-focused build, eschewing modern safety systems and infotainment in favor of analog tactility. The goal isn’t just to honor the P1800’s past but to offer a vision of what it might have become had motorsport-driven evolution continued uninterrupted from the 1960s.
A Restomod for the Road, Not the Track
Where Cyan diverges from its earlier P1800 build is intent. This GT version has been tuned with long-distance comfort in mind. Think country roads, weekend escapes, and an interior trimmed in sand-colored leather and fabric. The exhaust is quieter, the suspension more compliant. You’re not giving up performance, but you're gaining a layer of maturity—a car that rewards fast driving but doesn't demand it.
Production is, of course, limited. Each car is built to order with delivery timelines stretching 12 to 15 months. Pricing hovers around £375,000–£440,000, depending on customization. For comparison, that places it squarely in Singer territory—but with Scandinavian character, not California sunshine.
The Singer Analogy Makes Sense—But Only to a Point
It’s tempting to see Cyan as the Singer of Sweden, and the comparison holds in spirit: obsessive craftsmanship, reverence for heritage, and a refusal to compromise. But where Singer romanticizes analog performance within Porsche’s framework, Cyan seems more interested in performance as lineage—taking what Volvo once was and projecting what it could have been if motorsport, not mass production, had won the corporate argument.
In a market where restomods are often more about image than experience, Cyan Racing’s P1800 GT stands apart. It isn’t retro for retro's sake. It’s a reinterpretation of Volvo’s past with brutal clarity and ambition.
