Lee Noble

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 low-volume 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