THE OCTANE INTERVIEW
Octane meets the man behind nearly two decades of mould-breakingly brilliant sports cars and finds he has a surprise still in store
Lee Noble’s life as a supercar builder
LEE NOBLE IS a troubled man. As we sit here in the workshop behind his Leicestershire home, he fears eviction. The property was sold, you see, and as he and I chew the fat about cars, his solicitor calls to say that the buyers have completed unexpectedly early, meaning that, in effect, we’re about to be trespassers. A flurry of calls back and forth, and reassurance is offered that he’s not going to be marched off the premises. We breathe a collective sigh of relief.
But after a lifetime working in the lowvolume sports car business, Noble is used to the unpredictable. In 1999 he presented the first working model of his M10 sports car to
Autocar magazine, completely on spec, not knowing how they would react. ‘It could have finished me off before I’d started,’ says Lee. ‘But the gamble was worth it – sometimes you’ve just gotta take the risk.’
Yet for someone who many would perceive (quite rightly) as being the original petrolhead’s petrolhead, Lee Noble had no interest at all in cars at first. ‘I was model aeroplane-mad, that was my passion,’ he says. ‘But I was always interested in how they were engineered. I used to make them from kits and dad and I would spend every weekend at Wymeswold Airfield [in Leicestershire, where Noble was brought up] flying them.’
Those boyhood trips were never made in run-of-the-mill motors, either, so it was only a matter of time before the car bug bit: ‘Dad tended to buy Italian, so I can remember all sorts of cars from Fiat 850s to Lancia Betas, and I think an Alfetta saloon at one point. Best part was, when we finished flying the model planes, he’d let me have a go behind the wheel on the track – probably from the age of ten. It was a perfect childhood, really.’
For many car people, the childhood drive on a private airfield, feet barely touching the pedals, is almost a rite of passage. But for Lee Noble it was more than inspiring, and led to a career that to date has spanned more than 40 years as one of the industry’s maverick creators of magnificently fast and hugely capable machines for both road and track.
Ah, that word: maverick. ‘I guess it’s fair to use that,’ says Noble. ‘But it also annoys me, because it suggests that I’m some kind of rebel. Which I’m not. It’s true, though, that I’ve always enjoyed working alone, right from my mid-20s when I started to build my own cars. And I get a real kick from producing something – every nut, bolt and washer of it – without anyone else involved. There are some really great engineers and designers out there, but most work in committees, which compromises everything. I’ve always worked alone – and invested my own money to get projects off the ground. So if that makes me a maverick, I’ll take it on the chin.’
And it was this single-minded determination that came into its own when Noble risked everything by trusting that the motoring press would instantly warm to the first cars bearing his name. ‘I didn’t have the budget to advertise the Noble M10,’ Lee admits. ‘So it was the press, or nothing. Nobody took me seriously to start with, but it worked out in the end.’
Which is something of an understatement; the M10 elicited huge positivity among motoring journalists. But it was Noble’s next model that sealed the fate of Noble Automotive and created a low-volume manufacturing phenomenon that, two decades on, has not been bettered. That car was the Noble M12 GTO, and to this day it still has the potential to put fear into many a Ferrari or Porsche driver.
Yet the M12 was 20 years in the making. ‘I was focused on racing from the start,’ says Noble. ‘In my early 20s, I funded it through restoring cars, but by around 1984 [at the age of 26] I needed something more to pay the bills and keep me on track – literally. That’s when I built my first car, the Ultima Mk1, based on the popularity of Group C racing at the time. That led to two more Ultima models, before I was persuaded to go down the replica route, with cars like the P4 Ferrari, followed by a copy of the Lotus 23B, which I sold in kit form. I raced that one too, before having a big crash, which destroyed the car.’
Faster and ever-more capable cars followed from Noble’s workshop, one of which – the Pro Sport 3000 – spawned a one-make race series, and led to a successful outing at the Daytona 24 Hours. But it became increasingly difficult for Lee Noble to ignore the market’s growing interest in affordable but fast road cars.
‘I took the somewhat foolish choice of designing a supercar called the Ascari FGT. But it needed investment to be a success. I was introduced to a Dutch businessman [Klaas Zwaart] who wanted to race his own car at Le Mans. I remembered thinking: “Daydreamer.” But I sold the company to him, and stuck around to help him achieve his dream – although he got no further than British GT in the end. I really didn’t like the guy and the feeling was mutual, so we parted company.’
That reminds me that Noble doesn’t pull any punches. I first met him 18 years ago when I went to test an M12 GTO-3 at Noble’s then factory in Barwell, Leicestershire. I was taken into his office and, not knowing what he looked like, was surprised when a dishevelled-looking chap appeared, sporting jeans and trainers and covered in a light powdering of GRP dust. He was so candid and lacking in BS that I started to question whether it was Lee Noble, or someone the company rolled out when the man himself was absent. No, it was the real deal. And as for punches not pulled? The evidence, I was told later, was a fist-sized hole in the plasterboard wall behind his desk, following a previous setto with one of his directors.
With the Ascari debacle behind him, and the Noble M10 positively rooted in the British press, Lee Noble’s launch of the M12 materialised in two parts. First, the imminent demise of the long-in-the-tooth Lotus Esprit meant the market was ripe for a mid-size twoseater sports car with power in the 300-350bhp range. And while TVR still held sway as the UK’s de facto low-volume poster boy, its homespun powertrains were becoming renowned for poor reliability and its chassis was hardly a reference for precision handling.
Most importantly, however, was Noble’s clever and pragmatic approach to manufacturing. ‘A guy called Jimmy Price used to visit me and tell me about the cars he was building in South Africa [at the time the Superformance Daytona Coupe, among others]. Up until then, I’d tried to build and sell cars under one roof, but with larger volumes that would have been a logistical nightmare – so why bother? Let someone else build them, I thought; dealers can sell them, and we just develop them. I called Jimmy and arranged to fly out to meet him. I was so impressed by what I found (at High-Tech, Price’s factory) that a deal was done over a bottle of wine and a handshake. From then on, my cars (fully trimmed bodies and rolling chassis) were produced in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, with powertrain installation and final assembly done at our factory in Leicestershire.’
These breakthroughs put the M12 on a firm commercial footing from the start. One could argue that, before or since its launch, no sports car from a low-volume manufacturer has come so close to bothering supercar royalty. Noble had taken the M10’s underpinnings and clothed them with a dramatic, be-winged closed body that looked more like a refugee from Le Mans than the benign-handling but brutally fast car that it was. And the M10’s mid-mounted Ford Duratec 2.5 litre V6 was retained, but nearly doubled in power to 310bhp, thanks to two Garrett turbochargers. All this for £44,950.
But why stick with the humble Ford engine? ‘Exactly for the reason that TVR was going bust trying to develop its own motor, while it should have been concentrating on making its cars better,’ says Noble. ‘Its warranty liability alone would have kept me in business for years! History is littered with people who’ve tried to design things way beyond their ability and budget. The Ford motor was a great foundation, and with our tweaks it became something quite special – but, most importantly, reliable.’
Over the next five years the M12 took scalp after scalp in numerous media comparison tests. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Lotuses were all present and correct, and while the M12 was flawed in some areas compared with the established players, its prowess on road and track bedazzled all who drove it.
Was there a secret formula to the M12’s much vaunted ride and handling? ‘If there was, I never knew it; everything I did was completely down to “feel”.’ Whatever the magic ingredient, Noble went on to develop the M12 through still more powerful iterations, leading to the M400 model, its name denoting 400bhp per tonne from its 425bhp Duratec engine.
‘THERE’S A FIST-SIZED HOLE IN THE WALL BEHIND HIS DESK AFTER A SET-TO WITH A DIRECTOR’
By that point, though, it was clear that the M12 family had gone as far as Lee could take it. ‘We realised that the M12’s transverse engine set-up restricted what gearbox we could use – and because of ever-higher engine outputs, we needed a different, stronger ’box. So the next model was destined for an inline installation with a manual Graziano gearbox.’
And this is where the Noble story takes a turn that ultimately led to Lee’s acrimonious departure from the company he founded in 2008. Lee unveiled the M12’s successor, the M15, to the press in March 2006 to rapturous fanfare. But his financial backers started to get cold feet about future development costs and sold their share in Noble Automotive to the late US-based race-team owner, Peter Dyson.
Noble explains why the M15 was stillborn: ‘Quite simply, stupidity. The new owners of the company had no idea. They decided to throw [the M15] away and repay the deposits. Then unbelievably, they took on the older design of the M14 show car [revealed two years before] to build a car costing twice the price.’
That car morphed into what we now know as the Noble M600 and, while Lee Noble was duty-bound to oversee its early development, he’s now equally keen to distance himself from the end product: ‘I was never convinced that the Noble name could carry a quarter-of-amillion-pound model.’
The fact that you’re unlikely to have heard about Lee Noble in the 13 years since he left Noble Automotive is hardly a surprise, when most of his work is consultancy-based: ‘I have designed various cars’ chassis, and travelled around the world advising on designs, and designing and prototyping cars for myself and others.’ The one exception was his formation of Fenix Automotive in 2009, and a return to the previous M15 concept. But the timing was poor due to the global economic meltdown and the project never got off the ground.
‘THE NEW OWNERS OF THE COMPANY HAD NO IDEA. THEY DECIDED TO THROW THE M15 AWAY AND REPAY THE DEPOSITS’ LEE NOBLE
Is Noble concerned about the future of the UK’s low-volume sports car industry, as we head towards a future of mandated new-car electrification? ‘It’s the million-dollar question. In the 40 years I’ve been making cars there has been a constant stream of things that could have killed off my business. But I’m still here, and I suspect that we’ll find a way to continue making low-volume specialist cars without having an adverse effect on the environment. I really don’t think that electrification is the answer, personally – far from it.’
With that in mind, does he have anything on the horizon that we can get excited about? ‘Oh, yes. Something very interesting and different. But you’ll have to wait and see…’