ANY JOURNALIST FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO HAVE arrived in Maranello to review a Ferrari will know the drill. The flutter of excitement as you pass beneath that famous arch, the rising tension as you look at the impossibly tight schedule for the day, then the mad southerly dash to the road that any committed reader will recognise, with its foliage-encased hairpins at the bottom and more open corners with far-reaching vistas as it climbs. Add in an F140-series V12, with its idiosyncratic gurgle and scream, plus the sound of tortured tyres, and it’s an experience as strong as when a child gets to decide the appropriate ratio of concentrate to water in their juice drink.
Continuing the mind-association game, testing a Noble has no less clarity. Rutland lanes, green, fast and flowing; all those little villages with the suffixes of - oadby, -thorpe and - ville; and whatever the case in more recent years, forever the dry rasp of a Ford V6, overlaid with the whistle, chuff and sneeze of two hard-working turbos. Less romantic, granted, but in its own way equally as locked down in my subconscious as any other car-and-place combination. It’s been nearly 20 years since a development Noble with a Ford engine pounded these lanes, but the hope is those glory days of the early noughties are back, because Noble is returning with this car, the M500.
The M600
