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If anyone truly bears the responsibility of keeping the manual transmission alive, it’s companies like McLaren, Ferrari, and Porsche—manufacturers that famously spare no expense on making their vehicles as excellent as they can be, and can frankly charge whatever they like for the privilege of ownership. But when even Maranello can’t seem to find a way to link up a true manual gearbox to its V12, something is seriously wrong.
Fortunately, this year’s Monterey Car Week has brought about a row-your-own renaissance, and the latest to finally join the party is McLaren. It’s just revealed its first manual supercar since the F1 more than 30 years ago, and it’s called the McL 6GT.
It’s a strange name, mashing up McLaren’s current Formula 1 chassis nomenclature with the spirit of its old Can-Am race cars, like the M6. Technically, what you see here is a concept, but the McL 6GT is promised to enter production in 2028, with its stick and three pedals in tow.
McLaren
Modern McLarens, from the MP4-12C to the Artura and even extreme examples like the Senna and W1, tend to follow some core design tenets. There’s a familiarity in their rooflines; tapered, curved noses usually incorporating the brand’s swoopy logo as a motif; and rear ends exposed for cooling and airflow. The McL 6GT doesn’t feature any of these things, however, which might make it the company’s most unique design since it relaunched its road-car operation 15 years ago. And honestly, I think it’s perfect.
There are references to the M6 GT abound, from the vertical headlights and Kamm tail to the position and shape of every duct, rendered with a simplicity that we used to see in supercars of the ’90s and 2000s but see less today. And inside, McLaren has transformed the shifter into an art piece itself, its metallic linkages attracting natural light from every angle in a sea of black and carbon fiber. They’re clearly proud of it, and they suitably want it to be the focal point in here.
McLaren
At the moment, McLaren has revealed precious few details about the McL 6GT under the skin. It’s powered by a V8, as so many of the company’s products are, though we don’t know if it’s turbocharged or naturally aspirated. There’s no hybrid assistance, as you’d guess, with the company promising a “tactile, analogue, and deeply mechanical” experience, and the monocoque and body are all made of carbon fiber.
What’s more, McLaren bills this as a “new type” of supercar “beyond the core portfolio.” Based on that, it sounds like manual transmissions aren’t about to become a standard feature of the brand; that, beyond the delineation of “Sports, Super, and Ultimate” models of the past, McLaren is diversifying into more exclusive offerings that, at least in this particular case, pursue a more analog experience counter to the regular lineup. For now, anyway.
Bruce McLaren’s personal M6GT, recently restored. McLaren
It’s a direction the company teased just weeks back during the Goodwood Festival of Speed, when it restored Bruce McLaren’s personal M6 GT—a Can-Am machine essentially rebodied with a closed cockpit for Le Mans and the like, that never actually competed and was ultimately converted into a road car. That M6 GT is essentially a blueprint for what McLaren seems to want to achieve with this machine, with the benefit of another half-century of technological progress and refinement to pull from. Sign us up.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
