Smoot operator

THERE IS A HOARY OLD TALE, almost certainly apocryphal, of a party being held with Brian Lister as its guest of honour. And the organisers naturally arranged for as many Listers as possible to attend. When the time came for speeches, Brian stood up and said something like, “I am so happy to see that of the x number of cars we built, y have honoured me with their attendance today.” The point being that ‘y’ was a considerably larger number than ‘x’.

It is a sad sign of the times that pretty much the first question that anyone asks in connection with those wonderful and usually Jaguar- or Chevrolet-powered sports cars of the 1950s is ‘Is it a real one?’ It is an important question, because so many are not. So let’s clear that up straight away: this is a real one. Not only that, it is the very last Lister to have been built and delivered before Brian Lister shut the shop for good in August 1959.

All that remained was the one-off spaceframe car that had taken so much effort and money and remained in bits at the time. It was sold off and eventually completed, and while it saw little success racing in the early 1960s, as an historic racer it has become a staple (and now winner) of the Goodwood TT. It is a car I used to race and is very close to my heart.

But it is also another story for another time. This Lister is chassis BHL135 (standing for Brian is the 14th and final production Costin-bodied Lister built in 1959, following the 17 production ‘Knobbly’ Listers produced during 1958. There is no BHL136.