Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and have we got a treat for you.  I’m going to set this up in my usual disconnected fashion, so deal with it.  After this, I promise not to talk about cars for a while.

This is a Panavia Tornado.

If you look closely, you can see that it carries an ungodly amount of explosives.

It has two engines producing over 17,000 pounds of thrust each, which will belch raging pillars of fire and propel its $27 million dollar aluminum body up to 1500 miles an hour.  It has two artillery cannons that will put out 300 shells the size of soda cans in the time it takes to read this sentence.  Each.  It can carry bombs ranging from cluster bombs to tactical nukes to “electro-optically guided glide bombs.”  I don’t know what those are but I want one.

More importantly, though, it has missiles.  It can carry Sidewinders to defend itself or six Mavericks or twelve Brimstones or four Stormshadows or two Kormorans or two Sea Eagles or other equally awesome-sounding pieces of ordinance.  Now, you can imagine that missiles capable of taking down an aircraft carrier are not the kind of thing that you want to be tossing around willy-nilly, and that’s where my next terrible segue comes in.

Go with it.
Go with it.

That’s a Noble M600.  As supercars go, it’s not especially sophisticated.  Rather than carbon fiber, which is what super awesome things are made of, it’s made of stainless steel, which…is what sinks are made of.  Rather than the quad-turbo W16 of the Bugatti or the hyper-revving V10 of the Lexus LF-A or the gargantuan V8 of the CL63 AMG, it has the V8 from a Volvo SUV.  And it doesn’t have sat-nav, a/c, anti-lock brakes, or anything.  There are better-equipped, cheaper alternatives from Porsche, Ferrari, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Mercedes, Audi, and Nissan, all of which you’ve actually heard of (as opposed to Noble).  But they don’t have this.


Remember the Tornado?  In the plane, that red switch there needs to get flipped up to push the button to make missiles of death spray all over the place, and in the Noble it turns off the traction control.  Let’s just clarify that real quick.

This Noble, despite having a steel body and a Volvo engine, is so ferociously powerful and dangerous that the switch that takes away traction control is protected by the same safeguards normally reserved for cruise missiles.  That’s how crazy that car is.

Coolest button ever.


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