A Noble sports car

Computer aided design (CAD) may be the buzzword across the automotive design houses of the world but at the industrial estate in Barwell, Leicestershire, where Noble oversees the engineering and finishing of his small but very special range of hand-built sports cars, there is no place for such things.

"At the end of the day a computer is just a big filing cabinet," says Noble, in justifying his Luddite approach to such aids.

"I tend to use 28 years of experience and gut feeling. Design comes out of your head and your heart. You don't need a computer for that."

And the other reason why he still carves his initial designs from blocks of foam and clay, like a surfboard shaper?

"I am absolute crap at drawing," Noble laughs. "I know what I want, but telling someone else is a very different matter. Getting an idea from your mind to somebody else's is impossible. If I style it (in foam and clay) then I can stand back and say, 'There it is, now finish it off'." From those years of experience, the mind and the heart has grown a company that is taking the rarefied world of performance sports cars by storm. Noble is no overnight success.

He has been engineering, building and racing his own cars for decades. His curriculum vitae contains some classic moments -- the development chassis for McLaren's F1 road car and the Ascari -- but his ultimate dream of making and selling his own cars in commercial numbers bore fruit only five years ago.

With the same make-it-happen mentality that still sees him sitting in his factory office grease-stained from the work floor, Noble drove his M10 to influential UK magazine Autocar and refused to leave until they saw him.

"It was pretty much a last shot," he says. "I stood in their front office until the editor was virtually forced to come down and see me. I gave him the keys, told him to drive the car for a few days and call me." The call came, the magazine gave the Noble rave reviews and suddenly Noble faced a bigger problem than fading into the night as an unsuccessful dreamer.

"Within days of the magazine publishing there were people knocking on the door and the phone was ringing off the hook. Within two weeks 60 or 70 people wanted to put money down for the car. There was me, one car and a problem -- what the hell do I do now?" What Noble did was to call South African Jim Price at his Hi-Tech Automotive operation. Price was building the AC Cobra replicas for the US, and quick time the Noble was added to the roster.

The Nobles arrive at the Leicestershire works as a fully-trimmed rolling chassis ready for Noble and his crew to add suspension, drivetrain and the hugely-worked Ford 3.0-litre V6 twin-turbo which gives the cars their super performance -- 0-100km/h in 3.7 seconds.

While it has been a successful operation -- Noble could not be more pleased with the consistently high quality of the product arriving in England -- there are winds of change blowing through the organisation.

The M14, unveiled at the Birmingham Motor Show, is Noble's next major model but rather than replacing the M12 -- as it did the M10 -- this far more refined and sophisticated car will be supplemental as a top-of-the-range offering.

It is also the result of purely British workmanship. "The M14 has never been near South Africa ... has never seen South Africa," Noble says. "It is not to say we are planning to build everything in-house but now we have shown that we can do it."

On the road

As a test track, Leicestershire's Bruntingthorpe airfield has some unique characteristics.

If you lose it on the outside of the very fast, first corner you could find yourself using a parked Boeing 747 as the armco barrier.

You probably also want to be wary of the fleet of B-Double trucks trundling around the outside of the track, mostly out of the way, but there are a couple of corners where the semitrailers come into consideration.

Finally, you need to keep glancing up because the light planes landing on the tarmac do not respect racing lines.

All in all, it was probably just the place to put a couple of idosyncratic Noble sports cars through their considerable paces.

It would be difficult to over-hype these cars -- at least in the case of the M12 and M400.

The M14 was still doing duty at the Birmingham Show and was not available to drive. The Noble pair of the M12 and M400, has been described as just what drivers fondly remember "real" sports cars used to be -- only much, much better. They are the result of a simple engineering principle done brilliantly. There is no need for a NASA-sized, computer-control system on the suspension to make these cars behave.

The magic of the suspension/chassis combination makes the vehicle stick well on the track and yet the car is truly compliant on everyday roads.

Precious few cars can provide track dynamics with these day-to-day manners.

There is certainly a need to get to know your Noble before you start to treat it like your daily ride. The acceleration is stunning -- real slap in the back stuff -- and that from minimum throttle input. Even with the M12's huge rubber (Bridgestone Potenza S-03; 225/40 18 front and 265/35 18 rear) and brilliant grip, any careless stomping of the right foot is going to induce lots of smoke and noise.

Noble hasn't mucked around with niceties when it comes to braking either. Four 330mm ventilated and cross-drilled discs (30mm thick for the front and 20mm for the rear) from AP Racing drag speed off like you have dropped a huge anchor.

And they do it time after time with not a hint of fade.

The Noble's steering is razor sharp and there is so much information coming back through the hydraulic power-assisted rack and pinion system it is a positive chatterbox.

Without a hint of vagueness, the steering has no tendency to tramline, just a readiness to react to any serious input from the driver utilising a miserly 1.7 turns lock-to-lock.

Sale on as Oz gets nod

Plans to sell the high-performance Noble M12 GTO 3R sports car in Australia are moving ahead with an expected August on-sale date.

"We are expecting final approval any day from government and from then it will just be a matter of getting the cars here," says Ross Meyer, Motor Group Australia marketing manager.

"Interest has been exceptional since we showed the car and in fact the three we had in Australia have already been sold to New Zealand."

Meyer says currency fluctuations prevent a firm price being set but he expects it will be close to $200,000. "That is about as precise as we can be at the moment but it wouldn't be too far off."

The more powerful M400 is also on the agenda and being tipped as a Melbourne Motor Show launch next March.

The V6-powered M400 would attract a price premium of between $60,000 and $70,000 over its sibling.

Meyer says almost half of those who have expressed firm interest in the Nobles plan to use them, at least partly, for racetrack activity.

"Interest in the M400 is obviously weighted in favour of people planning to use the cars on the track, but that has also been expressed by buyers looking at the GTO."

MGA, which will also import the Pagani Zonda supercar, is expecting sales of between 15 and 20 annually for the Nobles.