McLaren’s First Road Car Is Finally Finished, More Than 50 Years Later

In the late 1960s, Bruce McLaren had arguably the greatest company car of all time: a barely tamed version of his own championship-winning Can-Am racer. He called it the M6GT, drove the prototype to meetings and race weekends, and planned a run of 50 examples to take on Europe’s finest. Then came June 1970, when Bruce was killed testing a Can-Am car at Goodwood, and the road car dream was shelved for good.

Or so we thought. McLaren Special Operations has now completed a ground-up recreation of the M6GT, and fittingly, it makes its public debut this week at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

This isn’t a restomod or a modern reinterpretation. MSO started with a chassis from a period-built M6A race car, then shaped the bodywork using Bruce’s original molds, unearthed in the UK still bearing evidence of tweaks made during the original program. Rather than sand that history away, the team preserved it.

And the obsession runs deep. The suspension is restored original M6GT hardware riding on imperial-spec bearings that haven’t been in regular production for decades, the windscreen was recreated from digital scans, and every closed aluminum dome rivet was set by hand by an aerospace craftsman.

All in, the build consumed some 3,000 hours, with several of Bruce’s original mechanics and designers lending their memories to the process. One recalled sketching the rear upright around a banana in the engineering tearoom.

Behind the cockpit sits a period-correct small-block Chevy V8 wearing the same “camel hump” cylinder heads as the original spec, mated to a period-accurate manual gearbox. No hybrid assist, no paddles, and no screens.

Just a row of velocity stacks visible through the rear glass, exactly how Bruce would’ve wanted it.

The body wears a bespoke cream shade dubbed Colnbrook White, named for the factory under the Heathrow flight path where Bruce hatched his road car plans between races. Inside, green vinyl seats and a hand-turned walnut shift knob nod to his 1966 M2B Formula 1 car, which ran white with a green stripe.

The M6GT anchors McLaren House at this year’s Festival alongside the M8A, the F1 GTR, and the incoming MCL-HY Le Mans challenger. It also kicks off a new MSO heritage collection, so hopefully this isn’t the last time the archives get raided.

As a one-off built for McLaren’s own collection, the M6GT isn’t for sale at any price. It makes its public debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, running July 9 through 12, as the first piece of MSO’s new heritage collection.

McLaren M6GT: Restored by MSO

McLaren’s bespoke division recreated Bruce McLaren’s original 1960s road car using the actual period body molds and an M6A race chassis, debuting the one-off at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed.