Noble M600 Roadster (Foto Ufficiali)

[crabble]

First Photo of the Noble M600 Roadster

June 25, 2012 by Chris Rosamond

Photos courtesy of Noble Automotive

Noble Automotive has revealed a factory design study for an M600 Convertible model.

The M600 is a hand-built British supercar that uses racecar construction techniques and a Yamaha-derived 650 bhp, 4.4 liter twin-turbocharged V-8 to offer searing on-road performance – think 0-100 mph in 6.5 seconds and a top speed of 225 mph. The M600 recently became a global TV star on Top Gear’s triple-supercar shoot-out when it held its own against the McLaren MP4 12C and the Lamborghini Aventador – not bad from a bespoke company that has only ever claimed it wants to hand-build 50 cars a year.

The M600’s stated raison d’etre is to provide pure driving thrills that offer a different kind of reward from the ‘average’ modern day supercar. It eschews the modern trend for complicated chassis control systems and fool-proof paddle-shift gearboxes, offering only traction control and a traditional six-speed stick-shift so a driver who wants to extract 10/10ths performance will be rewarded for his own skill and experience. Noble Automotive calls the experience ‘analogue’ versus ‘digital’.

The car is currently only available in coupe form costing £195,000 plus taxes, but while the company denies there’s any current plan to actually build a convertible or roadster version, the boss Peter Boutwood does reveal that they’ve looked at the project on a “what if” basis – hence this official design image reproduced here.

Theoretically it shouldn’t be too hard to engineer a roadster version of the M600 without losing any of its hard-won performance credentials, as it’s built around a rigid aluminium and stainless steel tub and the carbon fibre body is not a stressed element.

The question is, in a market that’s already considered niche, would a roadster model attract the driving purists that the Noble appeals to, and if not, would the M600’s lack of perceived heritage put-off buyers from more obvious exotic choices like the forthcoming McLaren 12C convertible and the Ferrari 458?

Modificato 26 Giugno 2012 da crabble
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