It was a supercar ahead of its time, a harbinger of great things to come – and one of the rarest cars on the planet. Now a completely new model of Bruce McLaren’s first ever road car, the legendary M6GT of 1969, has been lovingly built by specialists.
The cream-white two-seat coupe is only the fourth M6GT ever constructed and unsurprisingly its first public appearance is one of the star attractions of this weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK.
The original car featured all the ingredients that would define the McLaren brand over the next 60 years: an ultra-lightweight fiberglass and aluminum body with a tuned Chevy 5.7-liter V8. The 0-60 time was just 4.2 seconds – making it the fastest accelerating road car in the world at the time. It left anything from contemporary Ferrari, Lamborghini or Porsche trailing.
That’s why the reconstruction of a M6GT, using the original molds and tooling, is far more than a McLaren marketing exercise; it has emotional, historical and technical significance for the automotive world.
The M6GT was Bruce McLaren's passion project. It was his daily road car. When he tragically died in 1970, crashing in a high-speed test at the Goodwood circuit, the M6 project was immediately suspended. By building a brand-new, factory-certified fourth car, the modern company is symbolically finishing the job that their founder started.
For decades, we’ve all credited the 1992 McLaren F1 as the car that started McLaren's legacy. Rebuilding the M6GT serves as a reminder that McLaren's DNA started 25 years earlier. It bridges the gap between Bruce McLaren's track-dominating Can-Am racing program and the luxury supercars the company builds today.
The 3,000-hour build forced modern, computer-dependent engineers to work with old-school processes like using original, imperfect 1960s fiberglass body molds and hand-drawn specifications. They had to recruit aerospace craftsmen to manually install period-correct aluminum dome rivets.
The gear knob is hand-turned solid walnut to authentically match the original, while the racing seats are trimmed in custom period vinyl with stitched heat-seam detailing in a matching green tone. Scans of the windshield shape were sent to a specialist supplier in order to recreate the unique profile of the M6GT’s bespoke design.
McLaren Director Jon Simms said the process was a "spiritual education" for the team, teaching modern engineers how to innovate within the absolute minimalist, lightweight constraints of the 1960s.
The technical spec of the car is classic McLaren: a naturally aspirated, longitudinally mid-mounted Chevrolet Small-Block V8 modified by legendary American race engine tuner Al Bartz. He tweaked the 5.7-liter (350 cubic inch) unit to produce 370 bhp and a top speed of 165 mph (266 km/h).
A race-derived aluminum monocoque was riveted to steel bulkheads and the body panels were fiberglass. Suspension was double wishbones with coil-over dampers and an anti-roll bar up front; twin trailing arms with double wishbones at the rear. Brakes were 12-inch Girling ventilated discs all around.
It was about the same size as contemporary Porsche or Ferrari models but was way lighter, weighing just 800 kg (1,764 lb), almost half the weight of a modern McLaren that is supposedly a lightweight standard-bearer.
During the build, McLaren brought in original 1960s mechanics and designers who had worked with Bruce McLaren at the original workshop near Heathrow airport. The project became emotional with firsthand stories emerging like how a banana was used to trace out the curve of a body panel.
Bruce McLaren was a legendary New Zealand racing driver, engineer and designer regarded as one of the most brilliant, versatile minds in motorsport history, achieving rare success simultaneously as a world-class driver and a visionary constructor.
As an ill child he spent two bedridden years obsessing over the mechanical workings of cars at his parents' service station. By age 15, he was racing a modified Austins and at 22 became the youngest Formula 1 Grand Prix winner in history (a record that stood for 40 years). In 1963, just 26 years old, he founded Bruce McLaren Motor Racing which today is a global racing and manufacturing empire worth billions, and now one of the UK’s largest independent companies.
Source: McLaren
