The McLaren McL 6GT Is a Gorgeous Ode to the Marque’s Founding Ethos

In 1969, Bruce McLaren riffed on his young racing team’s success in the Can-Am motorsport series to design and develop a road car called the M6 GT. When asked where his ambitions lay, he replied, “a civilized version of one of our racing cars… some way down the line, I think it’s bound to happen. I hope it happens.”

The original plan for 25 street-legal M6 GTs was eventually altered to 50 examples due to FIA requirements, but production never came to fruition, derailed by the 32-year-old McLaren’s death during testing at Goodwood in 1970. His name powered on through the eponymous marque, though, and the McLaren F1 of the 1990s is the supercar nonpareil, but an outlier. Now, following some ownership conniptions and a financial restructuring, McLaren Automotive is renewed, its previously rather technocratic approach tempered by a strong sense of history.

During July’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, the automaker’s bespoke McLaren Special Operations (MSO) division wowed the crowd with an expert and empathic one-off rebuild of the M6 GT. Turns out that car was teeing up the McL 6GT, undoubtedly one of the highlights of August’s Monterey Car Week. The marque’s C.E.O., Nick Collins, alluded to Bruce McLaren’s “maverick spirit,” but the new model succeeds because it remembers to be something that so many contemporary hypercars no longer are: beautiful.

“Really, we kind of wanted to go back to the beginnings, because there was an untold story, we believe, going back to the essential purpose of the unfulfilled dream that Bruce McLaren had,” explains chief design officer Kemal Curic. “Even before joining McLaren, I thought that [the M6 GT] was absolutely stunning, beautiful, and ahead of its time. So it was about fulfilling a dream, going back to the origins, and also learning from that car because there was so much goodness there… no empty calories on the car.”

The new carbon-fiber-bodied McL 6GT is similarly lean and pure of surface. Curic and his team have dialed down the caricature and delivered elegance to go with the innate drama of the vehicle, which is less obviously in hock to downforce or to the cooling demands inherent with other McLarens. There are plump curves on the wheel arches, straightforward but strong graphics (we love the rear lights), and great proportions. Like Alfa Romeo’s limited-series 33 Stradale (another retro-not-retro confection), the McL 6GT has echoes of simpler times—not least in the presence of an old-school manual transmission, complete with three machined pedals in the footwell and a gearshift cradled in an exotic skeletonized mechanism.

“[The original car] was really exuberant for its time, and you could describe it in two or three lines,” Curic says. “That was kind of our motivation for the new car. There are pictures of Bruce in his red M6 GT driving around, picking up groceries. That was meant to be his daily driver. For us, it was about taking the essence and then the idea behind it.”

Curic had a long stint at Ford, where he steered the visual destiny of the Mustang. Now he’s working alongside McLaren’s newly appointed chief creative officer, David Woodhouse, on a transformation of the company’s design philosophy and brand identity. The McL 6GT is more of a bridge between the old and the new, but it’s nonetheless a powerful messenger.

The notice it gives is that change is coming fast at McLaren, which is also bolstering its stateside stand. “Our largest market is in the U.S.—a lot of passionate fans, a lot of love,” Curic says. “Performance is something we know well. Now we’re going into the luxury space, and the luxury will come with the execution. That’s why the McL 6GT focuses on tactility and materiality.” As of press time, the production version’s performance specs and price have yet to be announced, but McLaren says 500 examples will be made.