For ride and handling, the M600 takes Noble’s already high dynamic standards to a new level. The car handles beautifully and rides as if it were gliding across the ground.
Steering is well weighted and extremely accurate, with plenty of available lock when correcting a slide. And despite the monstrous thrust it has to deal with, the chassis is amazingly well mannered. It can’t be driven with the commitment of a Porsche Boxster, but learn its intricacies and the M600 becomes far less scary.
The M600’s price becomes less eyebrow-raising considering what it does and how it does it. That it’ll live with a McLaren F1 all the way from zero to 200mph makes it unique among the 600 or so cars we’ve tested since 1994. It also rides as well as it handles. All of which, and more, makes the M600 Mega with great big capital ‘M’.
Easier to catch than a Ferrari 458, thankfully
For an old-school kind of car – a manual gearbox, no driver aids – the M600 was ahead of the curve. It had monstrous amounts of power before that was the supercar norm, and it had a (relatively) compact engine with turbochargers, rather than a huge banger, or something smaller that revved to the heavens.
And it was brilliant. I did the performance testing at MIRA proving ground and two things spring to mind straight away. One was the way it behaved on the dry handling circuit, on which there’s a long, high-speed left-hander that you exit at over 120mph. I’d previously accelerated out of it during the Ferrari 458 road test, the rear stepped wide and it took most of the track width and a nervy few moments before it gathered itself back up. The Noble – a car I initially found more intimidating – also stepped wide but it took the merest flick of the wrists to get it back in line. It’s a sublime-handling supercar.
What was harder was getting it off the line. We’d set what we thought was a decent 0-60mph time, but Noble’s engineers believed it could go quicker. We had another go, and it didn’t. They later said they’d never seen a clutch quite so melted.
Matt Prior
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