Posted by Alan Blair on December 15, 2008 at 3:32pm
This was taken at kartchner caverns on the last day of our 1100 mile tour in April. A little dirty but no worse for wear. Regards ScottScott passed this comment and photo on to me today and it got me wondering,How many miles have you put on your Lister?How much of that was street versus track miles?How long is the longest trip that you have made, to where, and did you have a passenger?Of all the miles that you have driven, what was the single most memorable mile (good or bad)?
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Keep them coming gang, I know there are some more Lister tales out there. Don't feel like you have to post something up to Bob B's standards, he just thinks that he gets paid by the word... ;-)
I suppose I had better put my entry in here since I started it.
Currently my Lister has 3865 miles on it. Strange but I think that is what it had on it before the weekend at the track. I better check it out tomorrow, I did have some trouble with the speedo not registering intermittently after getting the new Dana in the car, maybe its acting up again.
Anyway most of those miles are on the track for me, so even though I register that many miles its hard to say how many were spent moving forward verses spinning the tires and sitting in one spot... ;-) Realistically the first 500 - 1000 miles were all street and there were around another 300 street miles to break in the Dana 44 but I would say the balance was about 90% track.
The longest single trip I have made is from Vegas to Laughlin and back in a day, which was something like 200 miles round trip. My wife was a very good sport and did not complain (much) on the trip even though it was a pretty cold winter day and the roll bar diagonal was still installed giving her very little room. We headed down there to the Club Sandwich Kit Car event that is now known as Kit Cars on the Colorado. Tagging along was my brother in law, who lives in Vegas, in his Backdraft Cobra and a buddy of his with another Cobra replica that I can't remember the make. The event was about 90% Cobras with a few oddballs thrown in like a Dino Ferrari replica and of course my Lister. We had not intended to actually enter the judging but it was cheap and we got a Tee-shirt so we went for it. Wouldn't you know it, I got no awards but my brother in law got "Best Engine" and he actually did nothing to the car since he bought it used. I will never live that one down.
The most memorable mile is a tough one. It could be the first mile I ever drove the car. It could be the fastest lap I have taken around any track, especially if I was passing a Cobra. It could be cruising Las Vegas Blvd at night in the Lister and getting flashed by some fine young and drunk gals. It could be any mile just after fixing something broken, like the time the accelerator pedal broke and I had to scrounge a piece of banding from the side of the road to create a makeshift hand throttle to make it home. But after careful consideration the most memorable mile in the Lister is the "anticipated mile", the next mile I will drive the car no matter if its a simple run to the gas station complete with the typical "what is it question", the next mile at speed on the track, or the next cruise with my wife. Its all just too good and I look forward to each and every new mile.
I am at "about" 2500 miles, with numerous runs down Ca. highway 25 (my private racetrack, as the CHP & Sheriff only 'patrol" to about 7miles below my house), where I learned to ride my "crotch-rocket" & know the road very well & have "played" with some of our fellow gear-heads, bikes, Corvettes & a Lambo.I have also done highway 1 below Monterey / Carmel to the Hirst Castle. thus far mainly day trips but as I have more time :-) that should change.
Mine has a whopping 1600 or so miles on her. Averaged out in the time since I got her on the road, it's about 1 mile/day. Not very much, but at least I can say with some satisfaction that ALL of my seat time since I got the car largely debugged has been spent either autocrossing or on the racetrack, which was the reason I wanted to build the thing in the first place. I don't have any long trips to talk about; the lengthiest journey would be about a hundred-mile roundtrip, which of course these cars eat up without blinking an eye. My most memorable moments would be the day I had an autocross win over a Lotus 7 replica and my first (and hopefully only) encounter with The Law while driving the Lister. My write-up of that day was sent to most of the folks in this group in email form, but in case anyone needs to be bored stiff for a few minutes I've cut and pasted it below:
So it's 7:30 yesterday morning and I'm cruising into the north side of town on the interstate, minding my own business and enjoying the fact that the sunrise is finally starting to outshine the meager light cast by my low beams. The road is mostly empty when I notice a pair of headlights approaching rapidly in the rearview mirror. Finally they're right on my tail. In the growing dawn I can just make out the light bar of a police cruiser. Great! I've been pretty fortunate to avoid one-on-one encounters with the law while driving my Lister in "race mode", but there's no way around this one. He follows me for the next four or five miles, changing lanes when I do to pass slower traffic.. Finally I decide to take the next exit and let him go on. I move from the fast lane across three lanes of freeway and into the exit lane, signaling each time and pausing before moving into the next. He stays in the fast lane, then just before I exit he shoots across all four, pulls in behind me, and hits the overhead lights. Oh well, it was bound to happen some time...
I pull into a Mexican restaurant, park, and start reaching for my wallet and insurance card. He whips in behind me, blocks me in, then jumps out and says, "What the hell is this thing? I've never seen anything like it!"
Turns out he's a car guy who owns a C4 'Vette. When he hears of the C4 underpinnings and the Lister's Chevrolet link his grin is a mile wide. Out on the freeway next to where we're stopped I can see another patrol car, parked and shooting radar, and the cop I'm talking with gets on his radio, calls the guy, and tells him he needs him “I need you over here right away". The cop car tears up the freeway to the next exit, hits the turnaround, and a couple of minutes later is parked next to the other cruiser behind me. It looks like a drug bust, and breakfast patrons of the restaurant are standing in the windows, staring. It reminds me of a black and white Shelby-American ad I've seen in the books, showing a group of smiling motorcycle cops standing around the open hood of a 289 Cobra, with the caption, "Men who know fine cars, appreciate the Cobra!"
I spend the next ten minutes answering questions about the car and inviting the officers to the autocross. All the while I'm watching them walk around and around it, waiting for them to start taking stock of the slicks, absent front license plate, missing windshield wipers, etc. Eventually they bid me good morning, climb in their cars, and disappear, leaving me behind schedule but relieved. I smile at the people still staring out the window, jump in the car, and head back out to the freeway.
My nemesis is waiting when I arrive at the autocross...a tiny black thing loosely based on the Lotus 7. It's a little rough, like dedicated racing cars can get, but it's all business. Carbon-fiber everywhere, rocker arm front suspension, and 10"/12"-wide Goodyear Eagle slicks. There's not even a seat, fer chrissakes, just a molded channel in the floor of the cockpit roughly shaped to accept a reclined torso. The engine is from a Honda CBR1000RR superbike, reputed to be making somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 horses, and is complete with the 6-speed box from the same bike, connected to a couple of carbon shift paddles behind the quick-release steering wheel. I watch as the little beast--which has about an inch of ground clearance--gets hung up on the trailer while the owner is offloading it. Before I can offer to help, he puts his hands under the rear of the car and lifts it in the air, walking it backwards down the ramps until it no longer is stuck. Trying not to look too astonished, I casually inquire how much the car weighs. "739 pounds full of gas", comes the reply. Suddenly Mister Lister is looking like a '59 Caddy Biarritz with a trunk full of cement blocks.
The course is an odd combination of some pretty fast rhythm sections, with a fairly diabolical offset slalom and one extremely tight set of gates thrown in. There is one decently long straight following a slow turn where it looks like I can probably use the Lister's torque to my advantage, until I notice a pretty wicked bump running perpendicular to the direction of travel about halfway along it. Hmmm--just where I should be hitting the powerband under full throttle in second gear...
After an interminable wait, we finally get started. The Lotus and I, along with a double-entered (i.e. two-driver), hot-rodded Legends car, are the B Mod class for the day and are all in the first run group. The Legends car, although using a less-sophisticated suspension than the Lister or the Lotus, is also under 1000 pounds, has slicks and a sequential 'box, and is running a hot-rodded Yamaha bike engine that sounds nasty. One of its drivers raced professionally for quite a while and has something like 20 years under his belt competing at places like Lime Rock and Road Atlanta.
We get four runs in the morning session. The Legends car is having understeer issues. The Lotus is clearly quick but can't seem to make a clean run. I start off slowly my first couple of passes. It's about 45 degrees out and my Kumhos are like ice. Every touch of the throttle, no matter how gentle, produces wheelspin and wild steering corrections. I drop the tire pressures from 27/25 front/rear to 24/22, then finally to 21/20. On my third pass I finally feel some grip and start to give it the boot. Things feel good until I hit the "straight" at about three-quarter throttle. Just as predicted I'm right in the meat of the powerband when I hit the bump I had noticed before. On my first two runs, pedaling gently, I had barely felt it, but this time the rear of the car steps out to the side and I'm momentarily looking directly at three startled corner workers who should have been only in my peripheral vision. Later I will laugh with a couple of them about how they started running, but at the moment I'm a bit preoccupied. True to Lister form, I keep my foot in it and she corrects herself, no doubt leaving some interesting stripes on the pavement to commemorate the sudden lack of traction. From there on out I vow to breathe the throttle just a tad there, not because the car can't handle the bump but because I don't want to tear the rear end out of the car.
We finish our morning runs quickly. The Lotus looked and sounded impressive but there's no way to hear the times over the PA when you’re on the grid, and the 7 driver is pretty tight-lipped, so I can't really be sure where I stand. We take a lunch break after working the corners for the other run group, and finally they post the time sheets for the morning. The good news: I'm leading B Mod by 3 seconds over the Lotus. The bad news—the 7 logged a run that was 7 tenths quicker than my best. It doesn’t count because he collected a cone, but it doesn't bode well for the afternoon if the guy can make at least one clean pass.
We began our final four runs under leaden skies. The forecast was cool and partly cloudy in the morning with scattered showers of increasing intensity in the afternoon, and for once it seemed the weatherman may have called it correctly. In the back of my mind was the notion that I was facing a 50-mile drive home with no top, no wipers and slicks, but it was too late to worry about that now. My first couple of runs each knocked two tenths or so off my quickest morning time, but by his second pass the Lotus driver sliced nearly a second and a half off of his best morning run. He collected a cone on that fast pass, once again, but he still had two more tries to lay down something really quick and trouble-free. I lined up for my penultimate run 1.5 seconds off of the 7’s pace, knowing I had to either find some serious speed or quit trying. I let it hang out from the start, and instead of spinning off like I envisioned I found that the first half of the course had a flow to it that was not apparent to me earlier. I slid through the finish beams sideways and was rewarded with a time that cut the 7’s advantage in half. That was good for a brief smile, but I was still 7 tenths down on him, he still had two runs to my one, and…I hit a cone. My run didn’t count.
I returned to the start grid, shut off the Lister, and walked to the start line so I could hear the PA system. The Lotus edged to the line and screamed off on its second-to-last pass. It was clear from the way the car was hung out through the corners that the driver was going for it. I gritted my teeth as he crossed through the beams and the announcer called out “a time of 53.0 seconds, placing him clearly in the lead in B Mod and only a couple of seconds off of fast time of the day”.
Crap. I was once again 1.7 seconds behind the 7, with one run left to make. Worse yet, I felt it start to drizzle as I stood by the PA speaker. The rain quickly abated, but I needed to do something fast in every sense of the word. I got back in the car, cinched my belts tighter than ever, and waited for my turn. As with the prior run, I pushed myself to another level of performance. For the first time all day I felt like I nailed the entry and exit of the slalom, and used the power to rotate the car through the slower turns. I blasted sideways through the bump, tires spinning, and hit the 180 leading to the finish line nicely crossed up. As I turned to see the finish line clock I held my breath…
52.3, it said. I looked again to make sure, then pounded the transmission tunnel in delight. I had not only beaten my quickest “clean” time by almost 2.5 seconds, I now had seven tenths on the Lotus. Of course, he still had a run to make, and he knew what he had to do to beat me.
I parked my car in the paddock, loaded my stuff in the trunk, and walked back to the finish line to watch. The guys with the Legends car—who were done running for the day and were about 4 seconds off of the pace—joined me. It seemed an eternity until the Lotus buzzed to the line, engine running wildly up and down the rev range. The starter waived him off, and the car leapt from the line and tore through the first few corners. I watched in dismay as it began to disappear up the course towards the slalom, the CBR engine wailing…
…and then I heard tires screaming in anguish, and the Honda went silent. He had spun in the slalom and killed the engine, and it was all over.
It’s a meaningless victory in a minor-league local autocross, but I’m as proud of the Lister as I’ve ever been of any material object. I wished I had a bottle of Moet e Chandon to spray on passersby, but luckily for them all I had was a half-empty bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. I worked my corner for the other run group, watching the skies anxiously the whole time. I know Ed Dellis drove through a downpour of biblical proportions during a One Lap, but I wasn’t thrilled about repeating the feat. Naturally it started to spit rain just as I was climbing in the car to head out. It was gentle at first and actually stopped a couple of times, but out on Interstate 10 about halfway home the heavens opened. I slowed to about 60 mph, balancing the need to keep moving enough to prevent the cockpit from flooding with a desire not to skate off into a ditch upside down. I figured the rollbar would probably save me long enough for me to drown while trying to release my belts.
Thankfully the Kumhos maintained some semblance of grip, and about five miles from home it actually quit raining and the sun peeked through the clouds just a bit. I rolled up to the house soaked, grimy, exhausted, and immensely happy.
Well, with two Cannonball One Laps under my belt, believe me, there are countless tales to be told. I'm in a bit of a tapdance with this economy, so I've been busy on other things. When I get a little breather, I should be able to dig through the archives and find something to post...patience is appreciated.
My longest trip thus far, was to Reno Nevada for the Western States Cobra Bash. It was Duane's last hurrah as the event founder and organizer and it was the maiden voyage for Lister Coox 001. I drove up with a pack of Cobras and my car drove wonderfully. What an experience!
Replies
Currently my Lister has 3865 miles on it. Strange but I think that is what it had on it before the weekend at the track. I better check it out tomorrow, I did have some trouble with the speedo not registering intermittently after getting the new Dana in the car, maybe its acting up again.
Anyway most of those miles are on the track for me, so even though I register that many miles its hard to say how many were spent moving forward verses spinning the tires and sitting in one spot... ;-) Realistically the first 500 - 1000 miles were all street and there were around another 300 street miles to break in the Dana 44 but I would say the balance was about 90% track.
The longest single trip I have made is from Vegas to Laughlin and back in a day, which was something like 200 miles round trip. My wife was a very good sport and did not complain (much) on the trip even though it was a pretty cold winter day and the roll bar diagonal was still installed giving her very little room. We headed down there to the Club Sandwich Kit Car event that is now known as Kit Cars on the Colorado. Tagging along was my brother in law, who lives in Vegas, in his Backdraft Cobra and a buddy of his with another Cobra replica that I can't remember the make. The event was about 90% Cobras with a few oddballs thrown in like a Dino Ferrari replica and of course my Lister. We had not intended to actually enter the judging but it was cheap and we got a Tee-shirt so we went for it. Wouldn't you know it, I got no awards but my brother in law got "Best Engine" and he actually did nothing to the car since he bought it used. I will never live that one down.
The most memorable mile is a tough one. It could be the first mile I ever drove the car. It could be the fastest lap I have taken around any track, especially if I was passing a Cobra. It could be cruising Las Vegas Blvd at night in the Lister and getting flashed by some fine young and drunk gals. It could be any mile just after fixing something broken, like the time the accelerator pedal broke and I had to scrounge a piece of banding from the side of the road to create a makeshift hand throttle to make it home. But after careful consideration the most memorable mile in the Lister is the "anticipated mile", the next mile I will drive the car no matter if its a simple run to the gas station complete with the typical "what is it question", the next mile at speed on the track, or the next cruise with my wife. Its all just too good and I look forward to each and every new mile.
So it's 7:30 yesterday morning and I'm cruising into the north side of town on the interstate, minding my own business and enjoying the fact that the sunrise is finally starting to outshine the meager light cast by my low beams. The road is mostly empty when I notice a pair of headlights approaching rapidly in the rearview mirror. Finally they're right on my tail. In the growing dawn I can just make out the light bar of a police cruiser. Great! I've been pretty fortunate to avoid one-on-one encounters with the law while driving my Lister in "race mode", but there's no way around this one. He follows me for the next four or five miles, changing lanes when I do to pass slower traffic.. Finally I decide to take the next exit and let him go on. I move from the fast lane across three lanes of freeway and into the exit lane, signaling each time and pausing before moving into the next. He stays in the fast lane, then just before I exit he shoots across all four, pulls in behind me, and hits the overhead lights. Oh well, it was bound to happen some time...
I pull into a Mexican restaurant, park, and start reaching for my wallet and insurance card. He whips in behind me, blocks me in, then jumps out and says, "What the hell is this thing? I've never seen anything like it!"
Turns out he's a car guy who owns a C4 'Vette. When he hears of the C4 underpinnings and the Lister's Chevrolet link his grin is a mile wide. Out on the freeway next to where we're stopped I can see another patrol car, parked and shooting radar, and the cop I'm talking with gets on his radio, calls the guy, and tells him he needs him “I need you over here right away". The cop car tears up the freeway to the next exit, hits the turnaround, and a couple of minutes later is parked next to the other cruiser behind me. It looks like a drug bust, and breakfast patrons of the restaurant are standing in the windows, staring. It reminds me of a black and white Shelby-American ad I've seen in the books, showing a group of smiling motorcycle cops standing around the open hood of a 289 Cobra, with the caption, "Men who know fine cars, appreciate the Cobra!"
I spend the next ten minutes answering questions about the car and inviting the officers to the autocross. All the while I'm watching them walk around and around it, waiting for them to start taking stock of the slicks, absent front license plate, missing windshield wipers, etc. Eventually they bid me good morning, climb in their cars, and disappear, leaving me behind schedule but relieved. I smile at the people still staring out the window, jump in the car, and head back out to the freeway.
My nemesis is waiting when I arrive at the autocross...a tiny black thing loosely based on the Lotus 7. It's a little rough, like dedicated racing cars can get, but it's all business. Carbon-fiber everywhere, rocker arm front suspension, and 10"/12"-wide Goodyear Eagle slicks. There's not even a seat, fer chrissakes, just a molded channel in the floor of the cockpit roughly shaped to accept a reclined torso. The engine is from a Honda CBR1000RR superbike, reputed to be making somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 horses, and is complete with the 6-speed box from the same bike, connected to a couple of carbon shift paddles behind the quick-release steering wheel. I watch as the little beast--which has about an inch of ground clearance--gets hung up on the trailer while the owner is offloading it. Before I can offer to help, he puts his hands under the rear of the car and lifts it in the air, walking it backwards down the ramps until it no longer is stuck. Trying not to look too astonished, I casually inquire how much the car weighs. "739 pounds full of gas", comes the reply. Suddenly Mister Lister is looking like a '59 Caddy Biarritz with a trunk full of cement blocks.
The course is an odd combination of some pretty fast rhythm sections, with a fairly diabolical offset slalom and one extremely tight set of gates thrown in. There is one decently long straight following a slow turn where it looks like I can probably use the Lister's torque to my advantage, until I notice a pretty wicked bump running perpendicular to the direction of travel about halfway along it. Hmmm--just where I should be hitting the powerband under full throttle in second gear...
After an interminable wait, we finally get started. The Lotus and I, along with a double-entered (i.e. two-driver), hot-rodded Legends car, are the B Mod class for the day and are all in the first run group. The Legends car, although using a less-sophisticated suspension than the Lister or the Lotus, is also under 1000 pounds, has slicks and a sequential 'box, and is running a hot-rodded Yamaha bike engine that sounds nasty. One of its drivers raced professionally for quite a while and has something like 20 years under his belt competing at places like Lime Rock and Road Atlanta.
We get four runs in the morning session. The Legends car is having understeer issues. The Lotus is clearly quick but can't seem to make a clean run. I start off slowly my first couple of passes. It's about 45 degrees out and my Kumhos are like ice. Every touch of the throttle, no matter how gentle, produces wheelspin and wild steering corrections. I drop the tire pressures from 27/25 front/rear to 24/22, then finally to 21/20. On my third pass I finally feel some grip and start to give it the boot. Things feel good until I hit the "straight" at about three-quarter throttle. Just as predicted I'm right in the meat of the powerband when I hit the bump I had noticed before. On my first two runs, pedaling gently, I had barely felt it, but this time the rear of the car steps out to the side and I'm momentarily looking directly at three startled corner workers who should have been only in my peripheral vision. Later I will laugh with a couple of them about how they started running, but at the moment I'm a bit preoccupied. True to Lister form, I keep my foot in it and she corrects herself, no doubt leaving some interesting stripes on the pavement to commemorate the sudden lack of traction. From there on out I vow to breathe the throttle just a tad there, not because the car can't handle the bump but because I don't want to tear the rear end out of the car.
We finish our morning runs quickly. The Lotus looked and sounded impressive but there's no way to hear the times over the PA when you’re on the grid, and the 7 driver is pretty tight-lipped, so I can't really be sure where I stand. We take a lunch break after working the corners for the other run group, and finally they post the time sheets for the morning. The good news: I'm leading B Mod by 3 seconds over the Lotus. The bad news—the 7 logged a run that was 7 tenths quicker than my best. It doesn’t count because he collected a cone, but it doesn't bode well for the afternoon if the guy can make at least one clean pass.
We began our final four runs under leaden skies. The forecast was cool and partly cloudy in the morning with scattered showers of increasing intensity in the afternoon, and for once it seemed the weatherman may have called it correctly. In the back of my mind was the notion that I was facing a 50-mile drive home with no top, no wipers and slicks, but it was too late to worry about that now. My first couple of runs each knocked two tenths or so off my quickest morning time, but by his second pass the Lotus driver sliced nearly a second and a half off of his best morning run. He collected a cone on that fast pass, once again, but he still had two more tries to lay down something really quick and trouble-free. I lined up for my penultimate run 1.5 seconds off of the 7’s pace, knowing I had to either find some serious speed or quit trying. I let it hang out from the start, and instead of spinning off like I envisioned I found that the first half of the course had a flow to it that was not apparent to me earlier. I slid through the finish beams sideways and was rewarded with a time that cut the 7’s advantage in half. That was good for a brief smile, but I was still 7 tenths down on him, he still had two runs to my one, and…I hit a cone. My run didn’t count.
I returned to the start grid, shut off the Lister, and walked to the start line so I could hear the PA system. The Lotus edged to the line and screamed off on its second-to-last pass. It was clear from the way the car was hung out through the corners that the driver was going for it. I gritted my teeth as he crossed through the beams and the announcer called out “a time of 53.0 seconds, placing him clearly in the lead in B Mod and only a couple of seconds off of fast time of the day”.
Crap. I was once again 1.7 seconds behind the 7, with one run left to make. Worse yet, I felt it start to drizzle as I stood by the PA speaker. The rain quickly abated, but I needed to do something fast in every sense of the word. I got back in the car, cinched my belts tighter than ever, and waited for my turn. As with the prior run, I pushed myself to another level of performance. For the first time all day I felt like I nailed the entry and exit of the slalom, and used the power to rotate the car through the slower turns. I blasted sideways through the bump, tires spinning, and hit the 180 leading to the finish line nicely crossed up. As I turned to see the finish line clock I held my breath…
52.3, it said. I looked again to make sure, then pounded the transmission tunnel in delight. I had not only beaten my quickest “clean” time by almost 2.5 seconds, I now had seven tenths on the Lotus. Of course, he still had a run to make, and he knew what he had to do to beat me.
I parked my car in the paddock, loaded my stuff in the trunk, and walked back to the finish line to watch. The guys with the Legends car—who were done running for the day and were about 4 seconds off of the pace—joined me. It seemed an eternity until the Lotus buzzed to the line, engine running wildly up and down the rev range. The starter waived him off, and the car leapt from the line and tore through the first few corners. I watched in dismay as it began to disappear up the course towards the slalom, the CBR engine wailing…
…and then I heard tires screaming in anguish, and the Honda went silent. He had spun in the slalom and killed the engine, and it was all over.
It’s a meaningless victory in a minor-league local autocross, but I’m as proud of the Lister as I’ve ever been of any material object. I wished I had a bottle of Moet e Chandon to spray on passersby, but luckily for them all I had was a half-empty bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. I worked my corner for the other run group, watching the skies anxiously the whole time. I know Ed Dellis drove through a downpour of biblical proportions during a One Lap, but I wasn’t thrilled about repeating the feat. Naturally it started to spit rain just as I was climbing in the car to head out. It was gentle at first and actually stopped a couple of times, but out on Interstate 10 about halfway home the heavens opened. I slowed to about 60 mph, balancing the need to keep moving enough to prevent the cockpit from flooding with a desire not to skate off into a ditch upside down. I figured the rollbar would probably save me long enough for me to drown while trying to release my belts.
Thankfully the Kumhos maintained some semblance of grip, and about five miles from home it actually quit raining and the sun peeked through the clouds just a bit. I rolled up to the house soaked, grimy, exhausted, and immensely happy.