Lister Cars is a British racing car manufacturer and Jaguar tuning specialist founded in 1954 in Cambridge, England. known for its involvement in motorsport, the Lister-Jaguar was Britain’s most successful sports racing car of the 1950’s. In 2013 the Lister Motor Company was acquired by Andrew and Lawrence Whitaker. 2013 marked 60 years since the first Lister racing car, and to celebrate this landmark, the Whitaker’s first major venture was to announce ten Lister Jaguar Knobbly continuation cars. These iconic tool room copies were manufacturer using the same techniques, jigs and bucks as the original, and all ten had secured deposits within just four weeks of their release. Financial stability and an ethos of extremely high production build quality has led to the Lister brand once more burning brightly, with values of original cars increasing significantly since the Lister Motor Company was reinvigorated.
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Lister Cars is a British racing car manufacturer and Jaguar tuning specialist founded by Brian Lister in 1954 in Cambridge, England. known for its involvement in motorsport, the Lister-Jaguar was Britain’s most successful sports racing car of the 1950’s. It won at almost every circuit in Britain and was virtually unbeatable both in the UK, overseas and in the USA and continued to keep the Jaguar name in the forefront of sports car racing long after the Jaguar D Type had become obsolete.
The ‘Cars from Cambridge’ designed, and built by Brian Lister, were simply the best of their kind and dominated the field with Archie Brown driving, even when driven by Stirling Moss, who also drove a stint for Lister.
Brian Lister’s big break came when he was offered the engines and gearboxes by William Lyons (boss at Jaguar) from the retiring Jaguar D Types which had previously dominated at Le Mans, but which by 1956 were fast becoming outdated. Lyons was correct in believing that Lister would be capable of developing a race winning car, thus keeping the Jaguar name in the forefront of racing and at little cost to Jaguar.
Brian Lister designed and built a new lightweight and aerodynamic chassis and ‘knobbly’ body to take the Jaguar drive train and the world’s best sport racing car of the 1950’s was born!
For five seasons from 1954 Lister cars were always in the headlines and consistently beat the much larger works teams.
Sold in 1986, Lister Cars Ltd. based in Leatherhead, Surrey, with engineer Laurence Pearce produced variants of the Jaguar XJS which led the company to design a new sports racer, the Lister Storm. Launched in 1993, it would use the largest V12 engine ever fitted to a production road car up to that time, a 7.0 L Jaguar unit. The Storm was later developed for motorsport and later developed a bespoked Le Mans Prototype, the Storm LMP in 2003.
In 2013, Lister Cars was acquired by Warranty Wise Insurance Services, with production of new original specification 1958 Works Lister Jaguar ‘Knobbly’s’ restarted in 2014.