The life of Brian

Browse pages
Current page

1

Current page

2

Current page

3

Current page

4

Current page

5

Current page

6

Current page

7

Current page

8

Current page

9

Current page

10

Current page

11

Current page

12

Current page

13

Current page

14

Current page

15

Current page

16

Current page

17

Current page

18

Current page

19

Current page

20

Current page

21

Current page

22

Current page

23

Current page

24

Current page

25

Current page

26

Current page

27

Current page

28

Current page

29

Current page

30

Current page

31

Current page

32

Current page

33

Current page

34

Current page

35

Current page

36

Current page

37

Current page

38

Current page

39

Current page

40

Current page

41

Current page

42

Current page

43

Current page

44

Current page

45

Current page

46

Current page

47

Current page

48

Current page

49

Current page

50

Current page

51

Current page

52

Current page

53

Current page

54

Current page

55

Current page

56

Current page

57

Current page

58

Current page

59

Current page

60

Current page

61

Current page

62

Current page

63

Current page

64

Current page

65

Current page

66

Current page

67

Current page

68

Current page

69

Current page

70

Current page

71

Current page

72

Current page

73

Current page

74

Current page

75

Current page

76

Current page

77

Current page

78

Current page

79

Current page

80

Current page

81

Current page

82

Current page

83

Current page

84

Current page

85

Current page

86

Current page

87

Current page

88

Current page

89

Current page

90

Current page

91

Current page

92

Current page

93

Current page

94

Current page

95

Current page

96

Current page

97

Current page

98

Current page

99

Current page

100

Current page

101

Current page

102

Current page

103

Current page

104

Current page

105

Current page

106

Current page

107

Current page

108

Current page

109

Current page

110

Current page

111

Current page

112

Current page

113

Current page

114

Current page

115

Current page

116

Current page

117

Current page

118

Current page

119

Current page

120

Current page

121

Current page

122

Current page

123

Current page

124

Current page

125

Current page

126

Current page

127

Current page

128

Current page

129

Current page

130

Current page

131

Current page

132

Current page

133

Current page

134

Current page

135

Current page

136

Current page

137

Current page

138

Current page

139

Current page

140

Current page

141

Current page

142

Current page

143

Current page

144

Current page

145

Current page

146

Current page

147

Current page

148

Current page

149

Current page

150

Current page

151

Current page

152

Current page

153

Current page

154

Current page

155

Current page

156

Current page

157

Current page

158

Brian Lister tells Gordon Cruickshank about his giant-killing cars, the company and Archie Scott Brown, who would have been 70 this year

On July 4, Stirling Moss will open a engineering factory near Cambridge. Not the normal outing for a motor racing celebrity you’ll agree, but the company involved has a name redolent of success on the track, of heroism, and of brilliant talent shining against all odds. The name is Lister, and the factory does not make, sponsor, or even mend racing cars. Not any more.

“It was success beyond my wildest dreams.” The world of motor racing is more usually strewn with disappointment than fulfillment, so it is refreshing to talk history with the man who says this Brian Lister. His story has the perfect ingredients: small outfit versus big team; clashing hero overcomes problems to achieve fame, if not fortune. That the hero, Archie Scott Brown, came to a tragic end, and the underdogs withdrew at the peak of their fame might add a strain of melancholy; but Lister, fit and hearty in his 71st year, doesn’t show this, 38 years after he decided to withdraw from sportscar racing, having humbled the works Aston Martin team, and with a thriving order book.

Instead of being carried away with the romance of winning in Lister’s glory days between 1954 and 1959, he remained focussed on the overall aim promoting the Lister company name. And it worked: in the short term by bringing in orders for racing cars from Europe and America, and more generally by giving the firm a flag to wave in engineering circles. “Once we got out, it gave me an entry to any buyer’s office I wanted,” says Lister. “We got one very big customer as a direct result. One ICI manager was a great motorsport fan and invited us to quote. There were no favours, but we got the job.”

Today George Lister & Co makes shrink-wrapping equipment and parts for TV transmitters, and barring two brief returns, has nothing to do with racing. The firm making the Jaguar-powered Lister Storm uses the name with Brian’s approval. “The new Lister does reflect on us, and I’m proud of what Laurence Pearce is doing. To qualify at Le Mans is tremendous. And participation builds morale; our workforce is proud to be part of the success, even from as far back as the ’50s.” The first of those two small returns to racing came in 1964?, when Rootes contracted Lister to build the special Sunbeam Tigers it had entered for Le Mans. But the job did not call on Brian Lister’s design skills: “They supplied all the bits; we just put them together.”

The second definitely was a Lister project. Watching the continuing success, and increasing value, of historic Listers in the ’80s and the appearance of some less-than-entirely honest examples, Brian decided his firm ought to be among the beneficiaries. For the company’s anniversary in 1990 he authorised a small run of new chassis, to be built to the same design by the same men, hoping they could compete in their own category with the 30-year-old cars. But the authorities disagreed, and at the same time the ’80s boom turned to dust. The project came to a sudden halt. Did these projects mean that he was missing the sport? “No. We were very lucky it lasted as long as it did. But one had lost a lot of friends, quite apart from Archie. I rather lost interest in the sport and wanted to get back to building up the business.

“You can have four or five years of success if you’re lucky, but unless you’re totally and utterly dedicated, other things take over. Success breeds commercial success; you have to take your eye off what brought you success in the first place.”

In Lister’s case, the unlooked-for result of Archie’s board-sweeping success in the works Lister-Jaguar in 1957 was orders from Briggs Cunningham in the USA and elsewhere which fully occupied the works, instead of forming a sideline. But did that mean the racing operation had become profitable? “Well, shall we say it was losing less,” Lister says wryly. “The chassis was coming to the end of its life. It would have been very difficult to keep our participation in racing going, and it could have endangered the company, whereas the whole idea was to promote the business.”

The chassis was a simple, rugged affair, designed by Lister himself; with equal-length front wishbones and a de Dion rear axle located by a sliding block, and from its early MG power up to monstrous Chevrolet V8s it changed little. “I didn’t look on myself as an innovator at all. I was just trying to put something together that worked.”

And how did he know it would work, when he drew up the Lister-MG in 1954? “I didn’t. The de Dion was the easiest system to make work, whereas independent systems were in their infancy and would have taken too much time and money to develop.” That pragmatic approach seems to characterise his career.

Engineering-trained at the family firm in Cambridge, he first dropped an MG engine into a Cooper T14 chassis. When it blew up, he ordered a chassis from John Tojeiro and installed an 1100cc JAP V-twin. The lightweight result was quick, if temperamental, and showed commercial promise. “I’d had the idea of producing the Tojeiro with the air-cooled engine, and John Tojeiro was all for it, as he was just starting his own business.”

His sales pitch was to enter a Cambridge University Automobile Club sprint at Bottisham aerodrome in 1951, where he expected to beat everyone. That he met Archie Scott Brown there is a matter of record; but it was not complete chance. “I’d heard that there was a remarkable driver putting an MG through its paces at a Cambridge 50 Car Club events, but the Bottisham sprint was our first meeting. I should have run rings around him with the Tojeiro.” Instead, he was almost matched by this cheerful character, only five feet tall, who seemed to ignore his own handicaps.

Born in 1927, the German measles Archie’s mother had suffered during her pregnancy had affected the limbs of the unborn child. His legs had been straightened to some extent by surgery in his youth, but remained foreshortened. His right arm was also severely stunted, with a vestigial palm instead of a hand. There was no logical way he could drive a car quickly; yet he was matching a purpose-made racing car in a thoroughly tired MG TD. Ignoring the laws of physics, he flung the machine from side to side with his tremendously strong left arm, steadying the wheel with his right stump when grabbing another gear.

Lister made an immediate decision; he would ask this unlikely tyro to drive his car, and concentrate on building. “He was so impressive; I thought ‘to get the best out of the car I need someone who can drive like this, and here he is’. So I offered him a drive.” Archie was very pleased; he was struggling to wring more performance out of his MG, and his erratic income as a tobacco salesman wouldn’t stretch to buying a racing car. It was an ideal pairing.

Archie’s regular successes in the Tojeiro-JAP against larger cars through 1952 and 1953 set a giant-killing pattern. Brian could see that he had no need to employ a known professional to carry the flag, or to develop the chassis design which was maturing in his head, and he trusted the man who was preparing the JAP, Don Moore. Moore’s MG expertise made it logical to use MG power in the first Lister, but as the demand for power pulled in first Bristol, then Maserati, Jaguar and Chevrolet units in later cars, the trio of Lister, Scott Brown and Moore remained constant.

All three were self-taught. Lister even designed the majority of the bodywork himself, working by intuition. “All my bodies were designed to have the minimum cross-sectional area. I tended to ignore aerodynamics since I didn’t know enough about it.”

The first exception was the 1955 Lister-Bristol, some examples of which carried ‘Dan Dare’ bodies with tail-fins, designed by Tom Lucas, an engineering student at Cambridge. “We windtunnel tested it in the university labs, more for directional stability than anything. It was one of the first bodies to be tunnel tested.” The wooden model still sits on Lister’s desk.

The other ‘outside’ design carried the signature of Frank Costin, high priest of aerodynamics. Intended to prolong the life of the chassis design into 1959, its sixth season, the dramatic body shape brought no advantage, according to Lister. “It’s interesting that the cars designed by Costin were no quicker than the ’58 cars, and the drivers didn’t like them. He’d got the lift right, counteracted that, but I don’t think they were a superior car; in fact quite the contrary. They were bigger, and on the kind of circuits we were competing on, airfield circuits, the drivers wanted as small a car as possible.”

Knowing that his own ‘keep it simple’ approach was not enough to carry the team forward with a new chassis, Lister had employed Costin full-time to design a platform for 1960. In the event, Costin was there for only nine months, as the team’s withdrawal in 1959 abruptly stopped the project.

Since the aim was always a commercial one, customers received exactly the same as Archie. But what customers didn’t get was Archie, whose lurid driving style blossomed with the arrival of Jaguar power in 1957. DSJ called him “a tiger”, and he tackled every car with the same grit – a Grand Prix Connaught, his own Zephyr, a lightweight Elva, the Murkett brothers’ 2.4 Jaguar. Whether or not it was his physical problems which made him a fighter, fight he did except on those occasions where his own fitness was questioned, here and abroad, and the authorities tried to stop him racing on safety grounds. Then Archie closed up in himself, but it was his friends in racing who fought his corner, and won. That was the measure of their respect. And affection: good-looking, amusing and charmingly wicked, Archie was welcome anywhere, a man whom women adored and men admired. Brian looks into the distance: “Archie was a remarkable man, a remarkable driver. It’s difficult to imagine how talented he was; someone disabled who becomes a driver Fangio admires.” For all his business practicality, it’s clear that Lister is also a sensitive man.

Asked about the unsuccessful Formula Two project, whose two manifestations appeared in 1956 and 1957, Lister returns to practicalities. “I felt that we should move into singleseaters to sell cars to club racers and get local publicity, not for Formula One glamour. Besides, F1 engines would be difficult to obtain. I thought I saw a good market, but…” But the F2 plan was sidelined by the sudden revival of Lister fortunes, flagging somewhat in 1956 with the unreliable Lister-Maserati. When Jaguar retired from racing at the end of that year having achieved its third Le Mans victory, it released sponsorship cash and D-type engines which blasted the team to the head of the sportscar results league. The F2 car never raced.

So, barring the one-off Monzanapolis special, there are no single-seater Listers dominating historic racing as the sportscars do. And how: a quiet amusement comes over Brian’s face as he says “I haven’t kept records since we stopped racing, but considering how many we probably made and I can’t be too accurate on that (little smile) and considering the successes chalking up all over the world every weekend, I should think there must be some kind of record about the number produced and the number of times they figure in the results.

“We’ve got a great enthusiast in the States–  Syd Silverman, who used to own Variety magazine. He has five of my cars – 10 per cent of production! – and one of the Sunbeam Tigers we built for Le Mans, and he’s running those cars pretty well every weekend. He reminds one of how racing used to be in the ’50s.”

So are the cars in their original spec? “I think he has a few tweaks: the brakes may not be quite the same, and I believe he uses water-cooled overalls like fighter-pilots do. He has two Jaguar-engined cars, two Lister-Chevrolets, and the Lister-Maserati.”

The Jaguar and Chevrolet-powered Listers were supremely efficient, using the best, simple, strong engines from each side of the Atlantic. But it was to Italy that Lister and Moore first turned to replace the Bristol lump for 1956. Maserati’s 2.0-litre A6GCS sportscar engine looked perfect: compact, light, powerful, and a bloodrelative to the Grand Prix-winning 250F. It was inserted into the old Lister-MG, by then retired, and a new, clinging body built around it, low and tightly bulged over the wheels – a style which became a Lister trademark.

Luckily no customers bought Maserati engines; the unit was a disaster. “We had so many problems with it. They were a peculiar company in those days; they sent a couple of camshafts over that hadn’t been hardened. We weren’t to know that; we installed them and ran the engine with the cam-covers off, and it was as if there was a cutting tool where the followers were – it was just taking metal off. They sent a piston to us once – blank, to machine as desired!”

So has the car been sorted now? “Yes. I went to Mid-Ohio last June and it actually finished the race. I thought how pleased Don Moore would be, but when I got back to the hotel that evening there was a message that Don had died that day. How he would have loved to know that the car had gone well.”

Lister himself did not drop out completely from racing after 1959: he served on BARC and BRSCC committees until 1974, including a year as chairman. “It was a way of putting something back into the sport,” he says as though he had not already brought enthusiasts one of the most exciting drivers and some of the most impressive cars in the business.

He leaves the impression of one who weighs his choices carefully, with common sense having the casting vote. He entered racing for a particular result; he used proven techniques and machinery, wisely eschewed innovation, avoided being side-tracked, and was strong-willed enough to retire when it made sense. Had Archie not been killed when he was, the chances are that Lister’s racing exploits would still have ended in 1959.

Hindsight, of course, changes the significance of events, as Lister’s thoughtful closing comment tells: “We didn’t appreciate its importance then; even when we were beating the Aston Martins, the atmosphere was more like winning your first club race.” Even history can be fun.