At the dawn of the 1990s, tuner car culture was on the rise, and almost every great marque had a dedicated tuning house working to unleash ultimate performance from their everyday road cars. AMG was putting the hammer down on Mercedes, Alpina was giving BMW’s M department a run for their money, and RUF was turning Porsche 911’s into global sensations before the internet made it easy. Jaguar was no exception, and Brian Lister had made it his life’s mission to endow their big cats with pace that would give the fastest cheetahs self esteem issues. Since the first Lister-Jaguars hit the racetracks with devastating efficacy in the late 1950s, Lister gradually built notoriety until making the transition to road cars at the start of the 1980s. By 1989, the Lister name was on everyone’s lips, as the brand revealed a true supercar killer in the form of the Lister Le Mans.
Based on the Jaguar XJ-S, the Lister extracted any sense of relaxation from the luxurious grand tourer by fitting a whopping 7.0-litre V12, capable of producing a tarmac-churning 600 horsepower and 600 lb ft of torque. In order to keep up with the increased power, bigger brakes and improved suspension were fitting. Not wanting their work to go unnoticed to the average passerby, Lister added a steroidal bodykit with deep side skirts, redesigned front and rear bumpers, more aerodynamic flying buttresses, larger wheels, and of course, a pair NACA ducts ahead of the rear wheels. In the end, only around 20 examples of the 7.0-litre Le Mans were built, and this example might just be one of the best survivors of the bunch.
Purchased by the current owner in 2018, this Lister was rescued from a lengthy period in storage, and was promptly treated to a bare metal respray to remedy the rust issues common among these cars. Once fully PPF’d, it was then trusted to leading Jaguar specialist, Tom Lenthall, who fully rebuilt the engine and upgraded it with a more modern ECU, while any other shortcomings were fixed in order to make this Lister as good as physically possible.
All in, the bills for the mechanical restoration alone totalled around 45,000 pounds, while the engine is still in its ‘running-in’ phase, meaning the next custodian can savour every ounce of performance offered by this 200 mph Lister Le Mans. If you think your collection has the perfect spot for this incredible piece of British tuning history, keep an eye out for Historics Auctioneers’ Ascot sale on September 20th, where this Lister Le Mans will be auctioned with its perfectly-appropriate ‘A70 LTR’ plate.
Ascot, 20 Sep
