Brian Lister started building sports-racing cars in 1954 at George Lister Engineering, his family’s ironworks in Cambridge. With the brilliant Scottish driver Archie Scott Brown at the wheel, the early Listers were quickly successful in British sports car racing.
The Lister-Jaguar of 1957, nicknamed the “Knobbly” for its curvaceous bodywork, used a 3.4-litre Jaguar D-type engine and won races across Britain, including the 1957 British Empire Trophy, and is often called the most successful racing car of the late 1950s. After Scott Brown was killed in a Lister at Spa in 1958, Brian Lister gradually withdrew from racing.
Laurence Pearce bought the name in 1986 and tuned around 90 Jaguar XJSs, then launched the Lister Storm in 1993 with a 7-litre V12, at the time the largest V12 fitted to a production car. In 2013 Andrew and Lawrence Whittaker bought Lister, and since then it has built continuation Knobblys, including the 2016 Stirling Moss edition, and Jaguar-based cars such as the LFT-666 of 2018.
