McLaren Special Operations (MSO) just closed a loop that started in the late 1960s. The team completed a one-off recreation of the M6GT, the car Bruce McLaren hoped would take his racing success onto public roads. It debuts this week at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Bruce McLaren had already demonstrated his cars’ capabilities in Can-Am racing with the M6A, but he wasn’t satisfied. Plans were underway to convert the M6A into a road-going version, the M6GT. This was meant to be a true road car designed to obtain Group 4 homologation, and McLaren hoped to produce 25 of these with the assistance of Trojan Cars. A few prototype versions were created, and Bruce even used one as his personal vehicle, which must have been quite a sight on the road, but everything came to an abrupt halt.
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In 1970, Bruce died on the track while testing a different automobile, bringing the road car project to a halt. McLaren would not launch a production road car until over 20 years later, with the F1. Decades passed, yet the original tooling and reference materials remained in McLaren’s archives. Then, in 2026, something changed: McLaren Special Operations (MSO) realized that this car needed a suitable burial and an appropriate conclusion. They opted to build the M6GT exactly as Bruce envisaged.
MSO’s team members began creating the car from the ground up, starting with a genuine M6.A race car chassis had been authenticated as genuine, and it was then a matter of locating the original body molds from the UK, which had been stored for years and must have been in very bad shape by the time they were discovered. As they worked with the original moulds, it became evident that they bore the marks of all the changes done back in the day. The team intended to maintain all of those details exactly as they were.
When it came to suspension, they decided to keep with genuine M6GT parts, which in some cases involved restoring to working condition components made with imperial-era bearings that are no longer in use. Nobody had manufactured those things in decades. Meanwhile, the MSO fabricators were hand fabricating a variety of components, including the roll hoop, rear frame support structure, internal reinforcements, and the entire wiring harness. They also designed a completely new windshield, scanning an original example to ensure it was just perfect. Not even the aluminum rivets went unnoticed, as the MSO crew located matching closed-style rivets from the 1960s.
Under the hood is a period-correct Chevrolet small-block V8, with the characteristic camel-hump cylinder heads described in the original designs, and to compliment that engine, they sourced a matched 5-speed manual gearbox from the same era. They weren’t looking to build a high-performance engine; instead, they wanted the mechanical package to be as close to what was available in the late 1960s.
Similarly, the paint and trim received the same amount of care and attention to detail. The car has a custom cream-based white finish that was produced specifically for this car, known as Colnbrook White (after the studio where Bruce worked on the road-car concept), and the interior is wrapped in green vinyl with all of the appropriate period-correct decoration. Even the gear knob on the shifter is made of hand-turned walnut. If you look closely, the white and green color scheme is reminiscent of Bruce’s first Formula One car, the 1966 M2B.
Jon Simms, Director of McLaren Special Operations, described the effort clearly: “The M6GT: Restored by MSO has been a labor of craft and care for the team and served as both a technical education and a living reminder of Bruce’s ambition to take McLaren beyond the racetrack. This car occupies a unique place in our collection – a tribute to the very beginnings of the company.”
