McLAREN M6 GT - HISTORY
Many consider the M6 GT to be one of the best looking and perhaps the fastest road cars of its era. As with the McLaren F1 it took a singular vision to produce such a dedicated driver’s car.
The history of this vision and the M6GT is told here by the people closest to the project at the time - Gordon Coppuck and Eoin Young.
GORDON COPPUCK
Gordon was Chief Designer in the late 1960’s
“Our original intention was to race the M6 GT at Le Mans, but when the idea fell on deaf ears because of homologation problems, we started to think about a road car.”
McLaren and Coppuck went to Detroit for a meeting with General Motors styling chief Bill Mitchell, who arranged for Bruce to drive all their exotic road cars on the GM test track.
“Bruce came away convinced that there was nothing special about any of them. He thought we could do better ourselves.
Back in Colnbrook we had a model of a GT body in the workshop and Bruce and I rubbed clay on it until we came up with a shape we were happy with. We put a ZF gearbox in it and completed the car that winter of 1969/70.
I borrowed the car one weekend and I took it for a Sunday morning drive to Bournemouth with my wife. It ran beautifully. It really was ridiculously fast for a road car at that time. It weighed the same as a Mini and had 10 times the power!
The acceleration was spectacular and the shape drew crowds everywhere. It wasn’t the easiest car to get in and out of and I remember it was the end of the miniskirt era and my wife was particularly shy of the onlookers around the car when we came out after lunch.”
EOIN YOUNG
Began working for Bruce McLaren in the early 1960’s and became one of the first directors of Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Limited when the company was formed in 1963.
This quote is from Young’s book “McLaren, The Man, the Cars & the Team” which was first published in 1971:
“Bruce’s favourite project was the road-going version of the M6 GT which failed to get homologated as a Group 5 GT car – of which 50 were required to be built – even though a batch of 50 neat-looking bodies had been made to fit the basic M6 monocoque Can-Am chassis.
Building his own road car was a project that had interested Bruce as an ambition to be achieved when the company was well under way with the racing program.
It was a five-year-old, off and on project, but early in 1970 he organized the building of one of the GTs for use on the road in an effort to find out what problems would have to be overcome in a proper mid-engined road car. The result was, literally, a semi-civilized Can-Am car that was anything but easy to climb into but was bliss to drive once you were installed.
Even with a standard five litre Chevrolet V8 in the back it would accelerate to 100mph in around eight seconds, and of course the handling was fantastic.
One problem was that the car was so low that other traffic often had difficulty in seeing it coming up behind. Bruce loved the GT, but he wasn’t blind to its shortcomings.
Gordon Coppuck and Bruce had long discussions about the GT and about the problems they had discovered running the car on the road.
The radiator outlet duct in the nose, for instance, while proving to be an ideal windshield defroster on cold mornings, generated a lot of noise and they had decided to delete the duct on the next version of the McLaren road car.
Entry and exit across the broad side tanks was another feature that was scheduled for a tidy-up.
Another problem was that it had odd sized wheels, with small ones in front and big ones at the back. It handled beautifully, but it meant that we would have to find out which were the best rim sizes so that we only needed to carry one spare wheel. At that time there wasn’t room for a spare anyway, and that was another problem.
I was really surprised with how comfortable the car was when I borrowed it for a weekend. Quite incredible when you considered that it was basically a racing car.”
