The Car Nerd with Jason Hassett
Noble M12: The £45,000 Car That Humiliated Porsche
In the summer of 2000, evo magazine strapped timing equipment to a British sports car almost nobody had heard of.It hit 60 mph in 4.1 seconds and 100 mph in 10.2—beating the Porsche 911 GT3, evo’s reigning Car of the Year.The Porsche cost £76,500.The Noble M12 cost £45,000.And its rear lights came from a Ford Mondeo.The M12 was built by Lee Noble, a self-taught engineer with no degree, almost no advertising budget and a habit of walking away from the companies he created. His earlier Ultima chassis had even been used by McLaren during development of the F1.But the M12 would become his masterpiece: a twin-turbocharged, mid-engined supercar built from ordinary Ford components, assembled partly in South Africa, with no ABS, no traction control and initially not even an anti-roll bar.It embarrassed cars costing several times more.And then the company behind it fell apart.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ORDER MY NEW BOOK "History Written by Losers" — out now!The true story of global power has been whitewashed by the victors and the fixers. This book tells the side of history they tried to bury. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ IN THIS EPISODEIn this video, we uncover the extraordinary story of the Noble M12: how a self-taught British engineer created one of the fastest sports cars of its era from Ford parts, fibreglass and a steel spaceframe—and built a machine capable of humiliating some of the most expensive supercars on Earth.The Chassis That Helped Build the McLaren F1:How Lee Noble’s Ultima Mk3 became the basis for McLaren development mules Albert and Edward, used to test components for Gordon Murray’s legendary F1.Noble Automotive’s Five-Car Failure:Why Lee Noble’s first production car, the M10, lasted just five examples—and why customers waiting for one asked to transfer their deposits to the coupé that replaced it.Building a Supercar Without Supercar Money:How Noble avoided bespoke engines, expensive tooling and conventional mass-production methods, instead creating a steel spaceframe reinforced with bonded aluminium and a structural roll cage.The Supercar Built in South Africa:Why Hi-Tech Automotive in Port Elizabeth constructed the chassis and bodies before shipping unfinished cars to Leicestershire to receive their engines and gearboxes.The Ford Parts Supercar:Mondeo rear lights and mirrors, Ford sensors, a family-car battery—and a Duratec V6 transformed with twin Garrett turbochargers into the heart of a 1,000-kilogram supercar.Why the M12 Had No Anti-Roll Bars:How Noble deliberately allowed the suspension to work independently over broken British roads, controlling body movement through geometry, spring rates and damper tuning instead.The £45,000 Porsche Killer:How the original 310-horsepower M12 GTO recorded 0–60 mph in 4.1 seconds at Millbrook and triggered a wave of international press coverage Noble could never have afforded to buy.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ LINKS & SUPPORT The book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH Documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett Subscribe for weekly post-mortems on the cars, companies and engineering decisions that shaped modern motoring.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━#NobleM12 #NobleM400 #LeeNoble #BritishCars #Supercars #CarHistory #AutomotiveHistory #Engineering #McLarenF1 #CarNerd #TheCarNerd
