A NOBLE ENDEAVOUR

The Ascari Ecosse is one of the more obscure supercars of the 1990s, yet being engineered by Lee Noble suggests it could be one of the most thrilling. 

- Glen Waddington

The claims are bold. Really bold. Top speed of 200mph, 0-60mph in 4.1sec, drag factor of 0.31, 400bhp, 1250kg: even by today's standards, that's fast, sleek, powerful and extremely light. The Ascari Ecosse is quite the supercar.

The what, I hear you ask? Exactly. So here's a very small number: 16. Only that many built, in the late 1990s, yet this car has quite a heritage, and dates from an era when it seemed that - suddenly - supercars were coming from every angle. Possibly the greatest supercar of all time was a product of that decade - the McLaren F1 - as were such greats as the Bugatti EB110 and Ferrari's F50, while the 550 Maranello revived the spirit of the Daytona.

But what about those we remember a little less well? The likes of those include the Yamaha OX99-11, only three prototypes built, all around Yamaha's Formula 1 V12 engine, which otherwise powered Brabhams on track. Or how about the two-off Nissan R390, a V8-powered homologation job? The wonderful Cizeta-Moroder V16T, the weird Panoz Esperante, Italy's De Tomaso Guarà, France's Venturi 400GT, maybe the Spectre R42 (basically a GT40 come back to haunt us)... I could go on.

Into that world arrived the Ascari Ecosse, another race-inspired road car with oodles of power from a well-bred V8, in this case a mid-mounted Hartge-tuned BMW engine. And it grew from a proposal made by one Lee Noble.