Lister Racing Lister Storm LMP by Scalextric

This was the first Le Mans car with an entire Danish driver line-up - John Nielsen who won Le Mans back in 1990 in a Jaguar, Casper Elgaard who had participated in Le Mans in 2001 and 2003 and later won DTC in 2004 and 2005 and Jens R. Møller who was a debutant in Le Mans. After the bad start in 2003 where Jamie Campbell-Walter crashed the car during the qualifica- tion for the 2003 Le Mans, Lister Storm was back in 2004 under Lawrence Pearce for Lister Racing with a hope for better times. Lister Storm was designed by Andy Thorby who also was the man behind the Panoz and the car had a very special look - specially in the front.

The enginepower came from a big V8 Chevrolet which was tuned in England and the engine was in the same chassis that was used in 2003 since there was only one Lister Storm produced at this time. First priority for the Danish team was to complete the race, but the biggest problem was that the three drivers hadn't driven in the car before and the car had not done too many kms, because the team did not race in the 1000 km Monza race and the car was driven by another team during the testdays at Paul Richard.

There were no high thoughts about the Danish team and you can hardly find anything about the drivers nor the car in the official program for Le Mans 2004 - except that it was a strong line-up and the car was fast, when it raced! There was some doubt about who was going to drive the Lister Storm because the Italian driver Andrea Piccini had bought the rights for the car for Le Mans 2004, but the dispute was at last settled by Lawrence Pierce. The first training at april the 25th gave a 16th place at 3m 48,717 secs and that meant that the team had beaten four other LM P1 teams.

First priority was - as mentioned - to complete the race and this succeded for the team. After the first four hours the team had gone from 16th to 10th place and it looked very promising despite a run through the gravel around 20:00. The Lister Racing lost a lap for every hour to the Audi R8s, managed anyway to stay in front of the Dome-Judd, the Lolas, the Panozs and other LM P1 cars. Around midnight a falt tire cost the team 24 minutes, but thsi was nothing compared to the loss due to a defect starter and gearbox, which sent the team several places down. The Lister Racing was now at 35th place and the only LM P1s behind the team was the Reynard-Lehmann and the Ray Mallock's Lola-MG. Once again the team had to pull the car into the garage at 9:20 int he morning, when a driving shaft broke and there was a leak in the cooler. The reperations took 1 hour and 40 minutes and the car left the pit at 11:00, but only 20 minutes later it hat to pit again. Thereby the Lister Racing ended the race at a 24th place doing 279 laps or precisly 100 laps behind the winners from Audi Sport Japan Team Goh.

John Nielsen, Lister Storm

Hour by hour: Start - 15th 1h - 12th 2h - 14th 3h - 11th 4h - 10th 5h - 34th 6h - 31st 7h - 31st 8h - 31st 9h - 35th 10h - 34th 11h - 32nd 12h - 28th 13h - 23rd 14h - 20th 15h - 20th 16h - 26th 17h - 20th 18h - 25th 19h - 27th 20h - 28th 21h - 27th 22h - 27th 23h - 26th 24h - 24th