Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, is to sign off the appointment of a chair of English football’s new referee within days.

Sky News has learnt that David Kogan, a media industry veteran who has helped negotiate a string of television rights deals across the sport in recent decades, is to be formally approved as chair of the Independent Football Regulator (IFR).

Whitehall sources said an announcement could be made by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) as soon as this week, although they added that the timetable could slip by a few days.

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Once approved, Mr Kogan is expected to face a committee of MPs for a confirmation hearing early next month, the sources added.

Sky News revealed last weekend that Mr Kogan had emerged as the frontrunner for the post after an earlier shortlist of three candidates was passed over.

The new regulator has the firm backing of Sir Keir Starmer, and is a key element of legislation currently passing through Parliament.

Mr Kogan, whose boardroom roles have included a directorship at state-owned Channel 4, was initially approached during a previous recruitment process launched under the last Conservative administration.

He has some links to Labour, having in the past donated money to a number of individual parliamentary candidates, chairing LabourList, the independent news site, and writing two books about the party.

Mr Kogan has had extensive experience at the top of English football, having advised clients including the Premier League, English Football League, Scottish Premier League and UEFA on television rights contracts.

Last year, he acted as the lead negotiator for the Women’s Super League and Championship on their latest five-year broadcasting deals with Sky – the immediate parent company of Sky News – and the BBC.

His current roles include advising the chief executives of CNN, the American broadcast news network, and The New York Times Company on talks with digital platforms about the growing influence of artificial intelligence on their industries.

In recent months, Sky News has disclosed the identities of the shortlisted candidates for the role, with former Aston Villa FC and Liverpool FC chief executive Christian Purslow one of three candidates who made it to a supposedly final group of contenders.

The others were Sanjay Bhandari, who chairs the anti-racism football charity Kick It Out, and Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, who chaired the new parliamentary watchdog established after the MPs expenses scandal.

The apparent hiatus in the appointment of the IFR’s £130,000-a-year chair threatened to reignite speculation that Sir Keir was seeking to diminish its powers amid a broader clampdown on Britain’s economic watchdogs.

Both 10 Downing Street and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) have sought to dismiss those suggestions, with insiders insisting that the IFR will be established largely as originally envisaged.

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The creation of the IFR, which will be based in Manchester, is among the principal elements of legislation now progressing through parliament, with Royal Assent expected before the summer recess.

The Football Governance Bill has completed its journey through the House of Lords and will be introduced in the Commons shortly, according to the DCMS.

The regulator was conceived by the Tories in the wake of the furore over the failed European Super League project, but has triggered deep unrest in parts of English football.

Its creation forms part of a process that represents the most fundamental shake-up in the oversight of English football in the game’s history.

The establishment of the body comes with the top tier of the professional game gripped by civil war, with Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City at the centre of a number of legal cases with the Premier League over its financial dealings.

The Premier League is also keen to agree a long-delayed financial redistribution deal with the EFL before the regulator is formally launched, although there has been little progress towards that in the last year.

“We do not comment on speculation,” a DCMS spokesperson said when asked about the impending announcement of Mr Kogan as the IFR chair.

“No appointment has been made and the recruitment process for [IFR] chair is ongoing.”

In the sportscar world, there is much discussion about retaining the “purity” of the sputtering, underperforming gas-guzzling engines of yesteryear. After a drive in Everrati’s Porsche 911 restomod, you’ll be ready to embrace the present and see just how much the drive experience can improve with modern technology.

There has been a lot of discussion about “purity” of the driving experience related to EVs. Some decry the “numb” feeling of the consumer-focused EVs they’ve driven, and think that this is indicative of some wider impossibility to provide an engaging drive experience in an electric vehicle.

But of course, when you compare a modern jellybean SUV, regardless of powertrain, with a purpose-built sportscar, there are going to be some differences in drive dynamics that aren’t flattering to the SUVs.

So lets make that comparison a little more fair. Let’s take an actual sportscar, a Porsche 911 (964) RSR, updated to the present day with an electric powertrain, and see just how much that “purity” in drive experience can be carried over with intentional effort, rather than kowtowing to perceptions of current market trends.

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For some background on myself, I started driving EVs with the original Mini E, which was merely a retrofit vehicle with the back seats replaced by a giant stack of batteries. It was a bit of a kludge, but I still fell in love with it largely due to the strengths of electric propulsion.

I then went on to buy an original Tesla Roadster, one of the few true sportscars out there that runs on electricity, so I’ve got more experience than most in small electric two-seaters.

There are certainly a lot of high-performance EVs these days, but most of them are hefty (4,000-5,000 lbs or more), 4-5 seaters with all-wheel drive (my toxic trait is that as far as I’m concerned, if it isn’t rear wheel drive, it isn’t really a sportscar).

So imagine my enthusiasm when I was offered a drive in a custom-built electric Porsche 911 (as long as Porsche refuses to make one itself…).

So, I headed down to Crystal Cove in Newport Beach, California, to meet Everrati CEO Justin Lunny and take this thing for a spin, to see what this real electric sportscar can do – and lets just say there might be a new entry on my lottery ticket shopping list.

Everrati is a UK-based company that does electric restomods of several vehicles, including the Porsche 911, Mercedes-Benz W113 Pagoda, Land Rover Series IIA and Ford GT40.

The company has completed 20 cars so far, with Porsche 911s being the most popular vehicle to convert.

I caught Lunny charging the Porsche as I pulled up, at a 50kW charging station. It has two charging inlets – one in the rear, under the trunk, which does DC or AC charging, and one in the front, using the 911’s original fuel door, which only does AC charging. The car is capable of 70kW charge rates, and while we don’t know what its charge curve looks like, that should mean 30-45 mins for a 10-80% charge.

The vehicle I drove is a 911 (964) RSR, created by Everrati as a commission, as many of its vehicles are. The vehicle still has a few finishing touches that need to be put on it, but otherwise was mostly complete. As a commission, the buyer was able to customize various aspects of the vehicle (including, for example, charge port location).

The interior of the vehicle is nicely finished, with everything redone from the original, but still in retro style. Gauges, knobs and switches are all in a similar style to the original, though a small single-DIN CarPlay headunit betrays the modernization under the hood.

It’s a two-seater, with some room behind the seats for some bags, but no seatbelts or room for people due to the rollbar. And the seats are heavily bolstered, locking you into position for when you whip it through corners. This is a real sportscar, it’s not just masquerading as one.

On a weekday on public roads, there wasn’t much opportunity to really open up the car or get in too much trouble, but the California weather and scenery were exactly what you’d expect. Our drive went up and down PCH and through some canyons, with a quick dip onto the freeway.

The amount of trouble we could get into was also limited by the car’s excellent handling. With a light weight and wide tires (295s on the rear, 30mm wider than the originals), the car felt extremely planted wherever we took it.

Everrati says that it’s important to maintain the weight of every vehicle it releases, and that it tries to ensure that its restomods don’t come out heavier than the original vehicle. It says this restomod is about 40lbs lighter than a 964 turbo (though that would make it heavier than the original RSR, which had significant weight-savings applied).

Despite the addition of a chunky 62kWh battery pack (range ~200 miles), Everrati says it was able to keep weight down by replacing several body panels with carbon fiber, in cooperation with Aria group, a contract manufacturer in Irvine, CA. Aria group works with Singer, the highly regarded Porsche restomodder – and is also helping TELO produce its tiny electric truck.

Everrati even went to the effort of ensuring weight distribution is similar to the original 911.

Famously, 911s are one of few cars designed with a rear-mounted engine, whose weight hangs behind the rear axle. From an engineering perspective, this is simply the wrong way to design a car – you want to reduce the car’s moment of inertia, which means bringing any heavy components as far inboard as possible.

Everrati did bring the motor slightly inboard of where the 911’s engine is, but it’s still placed behind the rear axle, maintaining the 911’s historically weird handling. And 70% of the car’s batteries are in the rear, to keep it rear-heavy.

In our drive test, the handling certainly didn’t feel heavy and felt extremely well-balanced, so we think Everrati did a good job here.

Steering is something else that Porsche has always been praised for. Everrati tried to maintain the steering feel of the original, with only light power assist leading to a heavy steering feel.

This was welcome to me, as my Roadster has manual steering, with no power assist at all. So I’m used to having to crank a small wheel around. The steering had a little bit of “play” in the wheel, which I imagine owes to its early 90s heritage (though still much tighter than the classic Bronco restomod I just drove prior), but otherwise felt exactly how I wanted it to – a relatively quick steering ratio with plenty of feeling transmitted to the driver.

But it has also managed to roughly double the horsepower from the original Porsche it was based on. Everrati says its restomod can produce about 500 horsepower, compared to the ~300 horsepower of even the racing version of the 964 911.

As is the case with Everrati’s vehicles, its drive software was customized for the customer in question. The customer asked for a drive experience that closely mirrored the original Porsche it was based on, so it wasn’t as “punchy” as some of today’s most powerful EVs, like Tesla’s Plaid Model S or the Turbo edition of Porsche’s Taycan and Macan EVs.

I liked this, myself, as I do think that we’ve gotten a little too punchy these days and lost the linearity I appreciate out of the throttle pedals in the Roadster and original RWD Model 3.

It also had virtually no off-throttle regen, instead placing the regenerative braking on the pedal. This is a sticking point for me, as I prefer one-pedal driving with strong off-throttle regen like many longtime EV drivers who have experienced it, so I’m glad that Everrati said it could offer something like that for customers who request it.

Speaking of brakes, the brake pedal, to me, felt a little soft. This could have been due to the tuning of the regenerative braking system, and also could surely be modified to an owner’s desires. I never did any particularly hard braking events that would have needed to engage the car’s friction brakes, but I just would have liked a little touchier brake pedal.

We also had a quick stop for a shake at the nearby Crystal Cove Shake Shack, and impressed some onlookers from the surrounding all-too-wealthy area. We caught several passers-by checking the car out, and they were quite surprised to learn that the classic Porsche they were looking at (otherwise not too rare of a sight in “New Porsche Beach”…) was electric.

Overall, this restomod is better put together than any I’ve seen or felt, and drove fantastically well.

I am often disappointed in some way by the EVs that I test drive, because they’re just not as fun to drive as the EVs that I’ve spent all my time in (Mini E, Tesla Roadster and Model 3). There’s often something missing, or something different, which may or may not have a good reason for being how it is, but at the end of the day it just makes the car less appealing to me than the EVs that I really love.

Not so with the Everrati. While I’d tune a couple things differently myself, this thing felt great. Just absolutely top tier. I just had to keep interrupting myself while talking to Lunny during my test drive, telling him how great this car felt. Just fantastic.

And that leads us back to the beginning – whether an EV can offer a “pure” driving experience. While taking this thing up and down PCH, through canyons, on a perfect Southern California day, without any of the rumbling, noise, or delayed shifting of gears needed from a traditional ICE engine.

There’s nothing to get between you and driving, and all the sensory experiences that motion entails. The car did what I wanted, when I wanted, and felt and looked great doing it. That sounds like as pure a driving experience as one can find.

As for the price? Well… “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” Everrati’s website doesn’t list prices, rather listing it as “POA” (price on application) and having a “let’s talk” button to reach out. The car we drove cost around $450k – on top of the donor car, which can’t have been cheap to begin with.

So, if you happen to have recently found that bitcoin drive you misplaced in 2011, now you know what to do with it.

If you’d like to read more (and see more photos) head on over and take a look at Everrati’s brand book, with lots of pretty pictures of the company’s vehicle projects.

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