McLaren M6GT revival brings Bruce McLaren's first road car back through MSO

It looks like a Can-Am car!

That’s because it largely is. Meet the M6GT, Bruce McLaren’s personal vision of his brand’s first road car. And perhaps unsurprisingly it is based almost entirely on a racing design – the McLaren M6A that carried him and Denny Hulme to a dominant 1-2 in the Can-Am series in 1967.

I’ve never heard of the GT before though…

Mostly because hardly any existed. McLaren took a spare M6A chassis and set about tuning it to be a high-performance road car instead. The original prototype was registered OBH 500H and was driven by Bruce himself, and proved enough to make him set his sights on building a total of 50 “civilised versions of our race cars. A fully equipped and comfortable car… somewhere down the line it’s bound to happen.” Except it never did and the project was shelved almost for good following Bruce’s death in 1970.

So this was the first road-going McLaren?

Correct. The much-revered F1 project came some 25 years later. The M6GT used a chassis that was actually built by Trojan, coupled to a 5.7-litre Bartz-tuned Chevrolet V8 (what else, coming from Can-Am?) producing around 370bhp, but as the car only weighed 800kg that gave a 0-60mph time of just 4.2sec and top speed of 165mph, which was pretty frightening for the late 1960s.

Is this the only one?

Yes, and no. Bruce’s original was bought by Hulme and had a stint in the Auckland Museum of Transportation before being sold to a collector in America. Another of the (two or three) Trojan-built prototypes found its way to Steve McQueen. But this car has been restored and reimagined to some extent by MSO – McLaren’s Special Operations arm that handles its more exotic projects and clientele. MSO sourced a period M6A chassis and unearthed the original bodywork moulds to recreate that dramatic shape. Inside, the original race cockpit remains with MSO fabricating a huge amount of stuff you can’t see, such as the roll hoop, rear frame, clam reinforcement, wiring and electrical systems. The suspension is original and took some aerospace support to restore correctly. The bodywork is Colnbrook White, named after McLaren’s first HQ, and coupled with a green interior as a nod to the livery of its first Formula 1 car, the M2B.

Can you buy it?

Currently this is a one-off labour of love from MSO to celebrate the marque’s heritage. But once it’s made one, it could technically make another. Perhaps this one may finally lead to the production run Bruce dreamed of.