Lister Storm

Mike Hughes drew a car with a job to do rather than a shape to admire. The Storm is wide, blunt-nosed and functional, built around an aluminium honeycomb monocoque with Kevlar and aluminium bodywork, and its drag coefficient of 0.35 tells you aerodynamics were about stability and cooling rather than slipperiness. The detail everyone repeats is that the doors and the greenhouse came from a Volkswagen Corrado. That is exactly the kind of decision a small British firm makes: the glass and door structure are the hardest parts of a low-volume car to engineer and certify, so you buy them from someone who already has, and spend your money on the chassis and the engine instead. The four-seat cabin drives the proportions. A long bonnet for the seven-litre V12, a roofline tall enough to seat people behind the driver, and a stance that is broad rather than low. The racing versions grew longer and more sculpted noses through the GTL and GT eras, which is where the shape finally looks purposeful rather than merely large.

This is where the Storm earned its reputation. Lister went GT racing in 1995 with the Storm GTS, entering the Le Mans GT1 class against the Ferrari F40, the Jaguar XJ220 and the McLaren F1 GTR, and retired. A substantial rethink for 1996, moving the engine and the Hewland gearbox, brought a 19th place finish at Le Mans. The GTL of 1997 and 1998 was a carbon-structured answer to the Mercedes CLK GTR and Porsche 911 GT1. The results came once the GT arrived. Jamie Campbell-Walter and Julian Bailey took the 1999 British GT Championship with seven wins from eleven rounds, then the 2000 FIA GT Championship, winning five of ten races in chassis GTM 002 and taking both the drivers' and teams' titles in Lister's first full season in the series. A second British GT title followed in 2001. The factory kept campaigning the car until 2005, then turned to the Storm LMP. For a firm that built four road cars, beating the works-supported GT teams of Europe outright remains an extraordinary return.

The Storm's fame is British and specific: it is the car that beat the establishment in FIA GT, and for a generation of British motorsport followers the black and yellow Lister is the memory of the 2000 season rather than any Ferrari or Chrysler in the field. Beyond the paddock it reached people mostly through games. The 1994 road car appeared in Gran Turismo 2 and the model never left the series, mostly through the race-modified version that carried on all the way to Gran Turismo 6, which is where most people under forty have driven one. That is a familiar route for a car with four road examples: the virtual population dwarfs the real one by several orders of magnitude. Its reputation is having a second wind. The Storm GT was announced in 2023 as the first car for the GTRevival series, which put a 1990s privateer GT1 car back in front of an audience that never saw it race. For a company whose founder walked away from motorsport in 1959, the Lister name has proved unusually hard to retire.

The Storm is easier to live with than its numbers suggest, and that is deliberate. It has four seats, a boot and a torque curve that makes it tractable at low speed, so it functions as a grand tourer rather than a weekend special. Owners report using them, which for a four-car production run is remarkable in itself. The V12 is the reassuring part. Jaguar built enormous numbers of that engine family, so the machining knowledge and much of the hardware exist outside the marque. Cooling deserves attention, as it does on every big Jaguar V12 in a tight engine bay, and the seven-litre capacity does the fuel consumption you would expect. The bespoke elements are the chassis, the panels and the trim. A bonded aluminium honeycomb tub is not a structure to repair casually, and body panels do not exist on a shelf. The Corrado-derived doors and glass quietly solve the parts problem that usually sinks low-volume cars, which is the single most practical thing about owning one.