Bruce McLaren’s personal road car.

The M6GT was a road going development of the McLaren M6 Can-Am car. Following the M6’s success in Group 7 racing, a proposal was announced to race in the highly lucrative Group 4 GT sports car season in 1969. Group 4 was a highly exciting racing group, with big names teams including Lola, Porsche, Ferrari and Alfa fighting for victory on the European circuits. The plan was to couple the M6 with a closed coupe body for long distance racing. Unfortunately, the homologation project hit problems, as new rules were introduced by the FIA for the World Championship of Makes, meaning that a minimum of fifty cars had to be completed before homologation was granted. McLaren always intended to sell the M6GT without an engine, leaving that option up to the customer. The project became too big for McLaren to take on and sadly, it was shelved.

McLaren had to forego the race car, but a M6GT was completed for Bruce to test as a prototype for a road car bearing the name McLaren. Bruce had never solely been a driver, but his skills as an innovator, designer and motivator ranked his company among the best in the world. With sufficient funds, he wanted to get the road car project underway. The plan was to build the highest specification, mid-engined car as possible with safety as an essential feature; to produce 250 units per year of the fastest, quickest accelerating car in the world. McLaren believed they could keep the price down by using a production 7 litre Ford engine. This engine would also help reduce the need for maintenance. Bruce knew any road car McLaren built would be based on the ultimate in racing-derived engineering, and this would be an extremely good way of encouraging sales in the larger, lucrative US market.

In total, only three or possibly four M6GTs were built, but only one of these, OBH 500H, was built at the McLaren racing factory. The other M6GTs were built by Trojan-Lambretta, the company that had the contract to build McLaren customer cars. One of these was bought by David Prophet who raced it extensively. The car OBH 500H was completed by late 1969 and became Bruce’s development car. To put the M6GT through its paces and learn what it was truly like, Bruce adopted it as his personal transportation, and remained so until until his untimely death in June 1970. The M6GT had become Bruce’s pet project and with his testing and development it would surely have been a great success. Unfortunately, the road car idea died with him, and the OBH 500H stands as a testament to his vision.

After Bruce’s death, Denny Hulme bought his M6GT and shipped it back to New Zealand for display at the Museum of Transportation and Technology. Hulme was finally persuaded to sell the car in 1990 and it went to a businessman in San Francisco. Some time after this, the M6GT was acquired by the Mathews Collection.

Apart from its paint the car is entirely original, even having the same tires that Bruce used to surprise people on the quiet English country lanes back in 1969. The M6GT has only been driven just over 1900 miles. Few historic cars have been preserved in such original condition.