This car, Lot 176, sold for $423,000, including buyer’s premium, at Gooding & Company’s Amelia Island, FL, auction, on March 3, 2023.
The big front-engine sports racers from the late 1950s comprise one of the most impressive and enjoyable vintage-racing groups in the sport. This is where you will find Jaguar D-types, Aston Martin DBRs, 3 and 4½-liter Maseratis and all manner of Ferraris. The American Scarabs run here, along with early Chaparrals and Devin’s SS. And, of course, Listers. It is a wonderfully diverse group with different sounds, looks and approaches. These cars generally carry aluminum bodywork and high collector value relative to the priority of simply winning.
With all the differences between cars, the playing field is leveled by simple constraints; they all had to run using what we would consider to be primitive tires and they raced on relatively rough roads. Also, international competition sports racers were limited to 3.0 liters. The U.S., of course, operated by its own rules, which is where the Lister-Chevrolets come into play.
The Lister saga starts
Englishman Brian Lister was a very competent engineer whose family owned a successful engineering company. He started racing in 1954 with a special of his own design and quickly realized that he was much better at designing and building than he was at racing. This coincided with getting to know a fellow countryman named Archie Scott Brown, who had been born with substantial deformities, including a single functional hand. He overcame them to become a spectacularly good racer, so Lister and Scott Brown became indelibly linked.
Archie and Lister enjoyed a good run in the smaller-displacement classes for several years, both with Archie driving and Lister Engineering selling to other racers. In 1957, they decided to step up to the international big leagues. With fortuitous luck, Jaguar had decided to throw in the towel for its D-type racing program, so a suitable engine and transmission were available inexpensively. The chassis was a development of the earlier cars, using multi-tubular construction, double-wishbone front suspension and a De Dion rear suspension. Archie proved to be successful with the car, so for 1958 Lister decided to build a short run of them.
The 1958 Lister is better known as the “Knobbly” because of its aggressive and bumpy bodywork. To keep frontal area to a minimum, body makers Williams and Pritchard basically stretched the body over the components much like a spandex unitard. They built 17 Knobbly Listers, and this has become the iconic Lister shape. I fondly recall one from many years back that was nicknamed “the Black Beast of Foggy Bottom,” and it fit the name: black, chrome and evil.
Across the pond
The Lister Jaguars were successful in Europe, but the big market in those days was the U.S., where displacement was unlimited and American V8s were the standard. About mid-1958, Lister arranged with Jim Hall and Carroll Shelby to ship Lister rollers to them for installation of a Chevrolet V8 and BorgWarner T-10 drivetrain. Thus, the Lister-Chevy arrived on the market and there were seven built in 1958.
The advantage of the Chevy V8 over the Jaguar I6 was far more horsepower and almost a hundred pounds less weight. The disadvantage was that it was really tough to get that much power to the ground with skinny tires. The chassis handled the additional power with reasonable aplomb and remained forgiving and predictable, but I’m told that on many tracks the Jag is easier to drive — and almost as fast.
For the 1959 season Lister made only minor adjustments to the chassis. The big change was that Lister went to aerodynamicist and car designer Frank Costin for a more-modern body shape. Costin’s philosophy was that smooth shapes were more important than frontal area, and as a friend has observed, the Costin Lister is the car that proved him wrong. The Costin body has a higher coefficient of drag than the Knobbly. Not that it likely matters much — all Listers have gobs of horsepower to push them and the Costin has less high-speed lift at the back. Chris Keith-Lucas, the English master of all things Jaguar and Lister, can attest that a Knobbly going 170 mph at Le Mans is scary light on its feet. The Costin is better.
The (mostly English) market for Lister Jaguars had dried up by the 1959 season, so only two were built; the remaining nine went to the U.S. for Chevy power. Archie Scott Brown’s death in a Lister at Spa had also killed Brian’s enthusiasm; 1959 was the last of the Listers.
For Americans only
So there are four flavors of big Lister: Knobbly and Costin, Jaguar and Chevrolet. Knobblys are more desirable than Costins (mostly because they look so cool!) but are not much different to drive. The Chevrolet Listers were originally strictly for the U.S. market, and to this day are not so welcome in European racing. The V8 cars are limited to this side of the pond. The lack of an international market for the Chevrolet cars hampers their value, evidenced by the otherwise-equivalent Costin Jaguar that sold over the same Amelia Island weekend for $775,000, 180% more.
One of the secret handshakes of Listers is that no two chassis are the same. There is no standard setup specification to make them work; each must be optimized with spring rates, shocks and suspension settings unique to that car. I have known our subject car personally for many years, and there is probably not a better example available. It has been rebuilt, set up, tuned and sympathetically maintained by the best shops on a cost-no-object basis.
That said, it is still a weapons-grade tool for finishing up front in American racing, not a collector object for veneration. Lister values over the years have remained remarkably constant. This allows a rational racer to buy one, have a wonderful time rattling windows and setting off car alarms at tracks around the country, then expect to sell it for roughly the same money. That’s what you hope for in vintage racing. As such, this car was fairly bought. ♦
(Introductory description courtesy of Gooding & Company.)
