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- The Tri-State Area
The first ever, road-legal, production vehicle from a classic racing brand is always something special, and the Lister Storm was no exception.
Lister was in its second life at the time, as Lister Cars under the ownership of Laurence Pearce. At the time, Lister was best known for its tuned and somewhat acquired-taste XJS models - particularly the Lister Jaguar XJS Le Mans. For this vehicle, Lister developed its own version of the Jaguar V12, bored out from 5.3 litres to 7.0 litres and good for 500hp. That was the largest engine fitted to a road car at the time, and powered the XJS past 200mph - in 1986, and a chassis dating back a decade already.
Unsurprisingly, Pearce wanted something a little more up-to-date to house this power plant, and came up with the company's only bespoke road car: the Storm.
Built around a unique aluminium honeycomb chassis, the Storm featured a mixture of aluminium and carbon-fibre body panels for its... somewhat unique looks which gave it a rather high drag coefficient of 0.35. Nonetheless the Storm could cruise up to 200mph, after hitting 60mph in a rapid 4.2s, making the 2+2 technically the fastest four-seat car in the world until the Brabus CLS.
That was assisted by that V12, which was related to but not directly derived from the XJR-9's Le Mans-winning unit built by TWR, now producing 550hp and mooted as the largest engine for a production road car at the time (and since WW2).
Not that the Storm would meet the standard for production. Lister was only confirmed to have delivered four cars and only three reportedly survive today - with a fifth, unregistered chassis that was part of a cancelled order popping up recently as a true masochist's project. At £220,000 a time, you could forgive buyers from avoiding this unknown quantity.
Of course the Storm also met with some fame in GT racing, taking overall victory in the 1999 British GT Championship (under controversial circumstances) and the 2000 FIA GT Championship. That of course came as manufacturers were phasing out their GT-class prototypes in disguise in favour of LMPs, leaving the Lister to duke it out with GT2 class Vipers.
The car last appeared in Gran Turismo 2 as the road car, while the race-modified upgrade version in yellow and green colours was a fixture through to Gran Turismo 6.
