Probably the most fun I’ve had on the road in years
Andrew Frankel tries the Lister Knobbly, a stunning retro racer that’s sheer pleasure to drive
If I were to design my perfect recreational sports car, it would be an open two-seater, with a big, naturally aspirated engine at one end and the driven wheels at the other. It would be low and narrow enough to thread through country lanes with confidence. It would have a great deal of power, certainly more than 300bhp but, even more importantly, as little weight as possible so it tipped the scales at well under a ton.
And if it were British and beautiful, so much the better.
Inadvertently, I appear to have designed a Lister-Jaguar, and only just a smidgen over 60 years late. For it was cars just like that you see here which became the fastest, most feared sports cars on the British domestic racing scene in the late Fifties.
The Lister Motor Company has, in fact, been making new “Knobbly” Listers (the name referring to its curvaceous lines) in tiny numbers for a while – but like the originals they have all been racing cars. Now, though, and for £15,000 more than the £300,000 list price, you can have yours with the sunken fuel and oil fillers, softedged switchgear and other minor modifications required for it to pass Individual Vehicle Approval. Which, in short, means you can drive it on the road.
The Knobbly is a true Lister, built in the same way, to the same specification and even on the same jig as the originals, and by the same company. Its body, hand-beaten
from aluminium for 400 hours, carries the same lines, its chassis the same tubular frame.
Then as now its engine is a 3.8-litre Jaguar twin-cam, tuned as far as it can go while staying reliable. Today that means about 340bhp. In a car weighing little more than a Smart ForTwo, the results are electrifying.
In a straight line it feels as fast as a brand-new Porsche 911 GT3 RS, maybe faster. Except you’re riding on oldschool, skinny Dunlop crossply tyres.
But despite this and the engine’s howl that seems to occupy your entire head, it’s a car you can drive with total confidence. It doesn’t matter if the tyres start to slide, because that’s what they’re designed to do and every angle of slip is faithfully communicated and easily corrected. The brakes are small but with no assistance and little weight to decelerate, they feel magnificent.
It wants you to hurl it around, so I oblige as best I can, and it just goes on getting better. There is a feel here, a sense of interaction with the machine you simply don’t find in modern cars.
If there’s a problem it’s that there’s very little point driving it slowly – indeed it soon becomes somewhat truculent if you do, while you yearn only for a place where you can really let it loose.
It’s great that Lister now builds roadgoing versions of the Knobbly and it was fascinating to find out how fun and fast the ideas of almost a lifetime ago can still be today. But if I owned one and unless I lived in the mountains, the only time I would take it on the road would be on the way to a motor-racing circuit.
The truth is that while the Knobbly is probably the most fun thing I’ve driven on the road in years, I’ve also driven one on a circuit and know all too well that, out there, it is something else again.
There is a feel here, a sense of interaction with the machine that you don’t find in modern cars