Tiff Needell on driving the Lister Storm: "a brutal car, wonderful to race"

There’s a word that sim racers love to bandy about and it’s ‘immersion’. It’s used to describe the feeling of being transported by a game into the Nomex underwear of a real racing driver, momentarily forgetting your boring actual job that requires you to understand quarterly sales projections.

The feeling that you really are at a live motorsport event, strapped into a racing car and not sitting at home in the dark in front of the TV, gradually losing bone density.

I’m as guilty as anyone of trying to chase the immersion high, whether that’s strapping on a virtual reality headset, rattling fillings loose in a motion simulator rig or even – and this truly pains me to admit it – occasionally wearing my racing gloves for particularly significant iRacing events. I draw the line at putting the helmet on, though.

I got thinking about immersion again around the arrival of Project Motor Racing. It’s a new simulator that not so much launched as faceplanted because of technical issues, but it does have some redeeming features and one of them is its selection of glorious historic GT cars.

A particular highlight is the snub nosed, V12 powered Lister Storm GT1 that terrorised much bigger, more well funded manufacturers throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The Lister Storm is plenty of fun to drive as standard, not least because the overpowered, analogue historic cars flatter Project Motor Racing’s handling model, which is slippery by default. It occurred to me, though, that to feel more immersed, I should get a better understanding of what the car was like to drive in period, from one of the guys who campaigned it.

And who better to ask than Top Gear alumnus, bona fide national treasure and the man tyre parents warn their tyre children about: Tiff Needell.

“The first thing you have to do, is you have to open the oven door and go and sit in the oven,” Tiff explained to me. “When you’ve strapped yourself into the seat and your bottom’s very hot, then you can start driving it. But then when you’re in the first two years of developing it, it will break down in every race.

"At the Nürburgring, the steering rack was only held on by about one bolt instead of four before I gave up trying to drive it round corners. And you can’t see out of the thing because the A-pillar is completely in the way of all right hand corners. But apart from that it was lovely. It was a brutal car, wonderful to race.”

This is obviously absolute gold dust as far as my quest for ultimate immersion goes. Hot bottoms and poorly fitted steering racks are things that modern racing games, for all their realism, can’t (or perhaps won’t) simulate.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and crank the central heating up to 70° and work a few bolts loose on my direct drive steering wheel ahead of my next online race...