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The first McLaren sports car

18 December, 2014

The current crop of McLaren sports cars — including our featured 12C Spider — can all trace their ancestry back to the late ’60s, and one of Bruce McLaren’s personal projects.

Having totally dominated the Can-Am race series, as the ’60s wound down, Bruce McLaren and his team started to work on a road-going sports car based on their M6 race-car. In effect, the plan was to design and build a coupé body and fit it to an M6 monocoque chassis in order to compete in the lucrative Group 4 category of the World Sportscar Championship (WSC). In that series, Bruce’s proposed M6GT would race against cars from Ferrari, Porsche, Lola, and Alfa. However, before the concept could reach fruition, the homologation rules changed. Introduced by the FIA for the World Championship of Makes, the new ruling stated that 50 cars would have to be built before any car could race in the WSC series.

This was essentially too big a project for the small concern to handle, and, alas, the project was scrapped.

Instead, Bruce decided he’d build it as a pure road car — and a single M6GT powered by a Bartz-tuned 5.9-litre Chevrolet V8 was completed for Bruce to test as a prototype. Built at McLaren’s racing factory, this first M6GT became Bruce’s personal car: two, or possibly three, more cars were also completed.

Registered as ‘OBH 500H’, Bruce’s red M6GT had an estimated top speed of 265kph (165mph), and was reputedly capable of dispatching the zero to 161kph (100mph) dash in only eight seconds. Bruce used this car as his personal transportation right until his death in June 1970.

Although Bruce had made plans to produce as many as 250 M6GTs a year — possibly powered by Ford’s 7.0-litre V8 — that dream died along with him.

Following his demise, Phil Kerr and Denny Hulme acquired the M6GT and brought it to New Zealand, where it remained on display at the Museum of Transportation and Technology for many years. Sadly, the car was sold in 1990 to an American businessman, before finally ending up on display at the Mathews Collection. It was auctioned off in January 2006, and was purchased for US$423,500.

Bruce’s untimely passing meant the M6GT never became a production reality. However, two decades later, with the revival of McLaren in Formula 1 racing, the dream to build a road-going sports car carrying his name was finally realized with the introduction of the McLaren F1 supercar in 1994.

Janspeed recreates the Jaguar sports car

29 September, 2026

Thankfully, a few of these cars made it to New Zealand, the odd one being imported from the UK over the years. However, the 1988 British Racing Green example owned by Bill Slater in Upper Hutt was originally sold as a standard car but converted using the full Janspeed kit by the first owner within a couple of years of buying it.
Bill has owned a few other Jaguars. In fact, after he sold his Jaguar XJ12 in 2018, he found himself pining for another and, when the XJ-S came up for sale, he could not resist it. Having just sold the V12, he was not expecting much from the six-cylinder car other than more reliability and it being cheaper to keep on the road. Naturally, he had heard of the influence Janspeed had on the marque, but it was not until he took the car for a test drive that he became aware of just how superior it was to the car he had just sold. The price of a second-hand Janspeed XJ-S and that of a standard 3.6 XJ-S is quite comparable, making the Janspeed version an incredible bargain, even more so in comparison with other performance classic cars — or even modern cars, for that matter — which cost far more bucks for the bang.

The writing on the wall

25 September, 2026

Deven, a digital content producer in his 20s, says it was the rear-drive Nissan and Toyota drift cars that fired his imagination in his not-so-distant youth and soon had him wanting one of his own. However, like most of us, he had to start in something less glamorous – in his case, a 1997 Mitsubishi Galant. After that, he bought a four-litre V8 1991 Toyota Soarer, a big change from the Mitsubishi.
“It was my daily driver, and it wasn’t that bad to run back when petrol was affordable,” he says.
When he got fed up with filling it up, Deven bought a 1989 Ford Laser sedan, a 1.3-litre five-speed manual, to be his daily driver. It’s in very good condition, bought from a careful older driver, and he still runs it – although he will occasionally also drive the latest in a series of Nissan Laurel sedans. His current one, from 1993, has done the lowest number of kilometres yet, at 183,000. It has the single-cam version of the engine in his Skyline.
“I’ve had four different versions of that car. It was just a car I always liked. It’s really comfortable, quite luxurious. I bought it from a 90-year-old in Hamilton. It’s in mint condition, and everything is standard.”