Cars You Forgot About: The Noble M15, Britain’s Porsche 911 Slayer

Noble is one of the only upstart, shed-based British sports car companies of recent years that’s actually managed to stick around and make a good go of things. Oh, sure, it’s always existed on the fringes of the industry, making low-volume sports cars for – let’s be honest here – massive nerds. It’s navigated its fair share of hurdles, too, not least the man who founded and gave his name to the company, Lee Noble, leaving to pursue new projects.

But it’s done what Ascari, Zenos, Caparo and Noble’s own follow-up venture, Fenix, didn’t, and has stuck around to this day. Sort of.

In the mid-2000s, though, Noble seemed to have bigger ambitions. Following the glowing reception to its first two models, the M10 and M12, it sought to create something just as brilliant to drive, but more refined, more usable. Something positioned to try and tempt people away from Porsches and, whisper it, Ferraris.

The first result of this ambition was the M14. Unveiled at the 2004 British Motor Show, this more grown-up take on the Noble formula used the same 3.0-litre twin-turbo V6 – yes, based on the one in a Ford Mondeo – as the M12. With 400bhp and 385lb ft in a car weighing just 1150kg, its performance certainly would have given a 997 Carrera something to think about.

The big difference, though, was the cabin. ‘Luxury’ wasn’t really a word associated with anything that had come from Noble before, but the inside of the M14 was roomier and plusher than its past products, and filled with leather sourced from the same supplier as a certain Modena-based company that isn't Maserati.

It all sounded very promising, and with a projected £75k entry point at the time, it would still have represented decent value. Things soon went quiet on the project, though – supposedly, Lee Noble felt the car’s design was already too dated, and he also wanted the car to have more power – something its Ford gearbox couldn’t handle.

It was two years later, then, that Noble returned with the M15. It looked sharper, more modern, and to put it less politely, less like it had emerged from an industrial unit in Leicester. It still had the Ford V6, but power was now 455bhp thanks to a bespoke Graziano gearbox.

60mph was said to take around 3.5 seconds, and top speed was quoted at 185mph – in other words, right up there with the Porsche 997 Turbo and Ferrari F430. Some car journos were allowed a go in a development mule, and heaped it with praise. The finished prototype was lapped on Top Gear, going faster round Dunsfold than the F430 and 911 GT3.

To top it all off, the M15 was still projected to cost a comparatively cheap £75k. Unsurprisingly, many orders were forthcoming.

So what happened? Why isn’t the M15 remembered as one of the greatest sports cars of the noughties? The answers, as usual, are money and politics. First, the company’s original backers couldn’t find enough funds to produce the new car’s tooling. A wealthy American M12 owner, Peter Dyson, stepped in to save not only the project, but the company, taking over all its shares but leaving Noble in charge of day-to-day running.

According to Noble, though, Dyson ended up cancelling the M15 project on the spot, forcing the company to return all the deposits it would receive. While Noble ended up leaving to found Fenix, Dyson would end up seeing the faster, more hardcore M600 to production.

That car is now off sale, but the company is still going. Its next car, the M500, is essentially a modern-day equivalent of the M15, with twin-turbo Ford V6 power and a manual gearbox. Having been revealed in 2018, though, there’s still no sign of this car actually on the road – Noble’s website only says it’s due for release in ‘late 2024’, which as you might have noticed is now in the past.

So will we ever see the M500 out on the road, giving a bloody nose to cars twice its price in the best Noble tradition? We hope so, but we can’t help but wonder how different things would have been if its spiritual forebear had made production some 20 years earlier.