Simon Taylor Full throttle
‘I remember catching a Porsche 928 loafing along at 135mph, giving it a flash and blasting past, changing into top at 150’
Just had an email from a reader who’s putting together a register of all Lister-jaguar XJ-SS. He’d heard I had one in the dim and distant. I certainly did. It was the very first of perhaps 90 XJ-SS modified by WP Engineering under the iconic Lister name. Actually, I can almost claim that the whole project was my idea in the first place. Brian Lister built the most competitive Jaguar-powered sports-racers of the 1950s, campaigned by the heroic Archie Scott Brown. One evening in 1982, over a glass of Château 20-50 in the old Steering Wheel Club in Mayfair, I told Brian about my then-current road car, a Jaguar XJ-S. That V12 is wonderful, I told him, but the soft suspension and soggy power steering spoil a potentially great grand tourer. Why don’t you turn it into the car it should be and call it a Lister-jaguar?
Rather to my surprise Brian didn’t dismiss the idea, and a few months later he bought an old manual XJ-S and turned it over to Jaguar fettler Ron Beaty at Forward Engineering. It emerged some months later as a fire-breathing 6.4-litre, initially with six downdraught Webers. I took it on a long run to France, and it was lightning quick. But it wasn’t a relaxed road car, and in mid-france the gearbox failed and I had to drive back to England in top (no problem with 450lb ft of torque).
Everything went quiet for a while. Then, with Brian’s blessing and backing from machine tools tycoon Iain Exeter, the project resurfaced in Leatherhead with Laurence Pearce. His company, WP Engineering, was founded by his father Warren, who was a demon E-type racer on British circuits in the ’60s.
Laurence agreed to use my car as the guinea pig for the first production Lister XJ-S. The engine was still a 5.3-litre, but with bigger valves, high-lift camshafts, Cosworth pistons and rods, radically reworked fuel injection and 12-branch exhausts; plus a five-speed ZF ’box, stiffer and lower suspension, re-valved steering and massive brakes all round.
Determined that my car should not look like a boy-racer’s fantasy, I vetoed any widening of the wheelarches, so the Compomotive wheels, 7in front and 8in rear, had considerable on-set. Neat glassfibre aprons front and rear replaced the clunky chrome-and-rubber bumpers.
Often a much-modified version of a welldeveloped production car disappoints because it compromises refinement or, worse, reliability. But my Lister XJ-S was a total success. I was covering the Formula One season at the time, and I preferred to go to most of the European races by road because the Lister was such a fabulous long-distance car. I remember on an autobahn catching a Porsche 928 that was loafing along at 135mph, giving it a flash, changing down to fourth and blasting past back up to my cruising speed, shifting into top at 150mph. For 30-plus years ago, this was quite something. I also enjoyed flinging it up British hillclimbs. You’d think it would be a tight fit up Shelsley or Prescott but it shrank around you, although the wheelspin in every gear could slow you up.
Later Listers were much more extrovert, with huge wheelarches, a drooping bonnet and four headlights, and then came the supercar Storm, in mindblowing full-race and road versions. (I borrowed one of those, and nearly lost my licence.) But a sober black XJ-S that looked just a little cleaner and a little lower than standard did it for me. It was one of the most enjoyable road cars I’ve ever had, and I only sold it to pay for an even dottier hillclimb car – a Metro 6R4, since you ask. But that wouldn’t have been as fun dashing across Europe on a Friday night to the next Grand Prix as my Lister.
I wonder where it is now? It was re-registered YLU 903X when I sold it. I hope it’s being loved and enjoyed, and not rusting in a scrapyard.