Dudley Noble, who started at the Rover Company in 1911 as a motorcycle tester and competition rider, became one of the British automobile industry's pioneering publicists.
He arranged one of the first ever promotional films to be shot, in 1912, of the Rover motorcycle production and testing, ending with a sequence of him accidentally falling off his motorbike in the middle of Kenilworth ford!
The idea of racing the Blue Train was very popular with motor enthusiasts, and each new attempt was received with varying expectations of success.
It was a moderately shameless stunt of him, being safe in the knowledge that the average speed of the famous express was no more than about 40 mph once all its stops and detours were taken into account.
He drove against the train from Cannes to Calais, then by ferry to Dover and finally London, travelling on public highways, and won; the H. J. Mulliner-bodied formal saloon he drove during the race as well as a streamlined fastback "Sportsman Coupe" by Gurney Nutting he took delivery of on 21 May 1930 became known as the Blue Train Bentleys; the latter is regularly mistaken for or erroneously referred to as being the car that raced the Blue Train, while in fact Barnato named it in memory of his race.