McLaren will build 500 examples of its retro-styled McL 6GT, due in 2028, backed by a £500 million investment from Abu Dhabi's CYVN Holdings that will create 1,000 new UK jobs over six years. The decision, announced after the concept starred at Monterey Car Week this summer, is the opening move in the most consequential redesign of the company's product line since its founding in 2010. Whether nostalgia can carry a business that has just retired its core model is the question.

What does this change for McLaren?

Everything and, so far, provably little. Production of the 750S has just ended; the Artura and GTS will likely be phased out next year. The W1 hypercar sold out — 399 units at £2 million each — but halo cars do not sustain a manufacturer. The roadmap is concrete: the 750S replacement, named McL 820, arrives in 2027, and an SUV is confirmed to be on the horizon. The McLaren Technology Centre in Surrey will be upgraded, the Sheffield carbon fibre facility will double in size, and a new factory at an undisclosed UK location is planned.

The man tasked with the reinvention is Chief Design Officer Kemal Curic, working with Design Director John Paul Gregory from a new design studio in Bicester, Oxfordshire. Journalists entering the studio must seal their phones in protective pouches to prevent photographs of half-finished prototypes — a measure that tells you how much rides on what is being modelled inside.

Why look back to go forward?

The McL 6GT reimagines the M6GT, a car Bruce McLaren built in 1969 as the company's first attempted road-going supercar. Three prototypes were made, based on the M6A Can-Am racer, with a fibreglass body over an aluminium monocoque, butterfly doors and a mid-mounted Chevrolet V8. Bruce McLaren used one as daily transport. "He drove it everywhere, from race tracks to the shops," Curic said. Bruce was killed in 1970 testing an M8D at Goodwood, and the project died with him.

"The M6GT was a guiding star for us," Curic said. "We still have one of the design models, which was placed alongside our clay version of the McL 6GT to provide inspiration. We didn't want to build a carbon copy or a continuation, though. Every single element had to fight its way into the design." Note the qualifier: the company insists nothing was kept for sentiment's sake. Buyers will judge whether the result justifies that claim when it reaches the road in 2028.

McLaren primed the audience carefully. It restored one of the three original M6GT prototypes over more than 3,000 hours at McLaren Special Operations (MSO, the firm's bespoke division), using 1960s blueprints and a period-correct small-block Chevrolet V8. The car appeared at Goodwood Festival of Speed in July, a month before the McL 6GT debuted in California wearing 'Bruce Red' paint inspired by the original. It now sits permanently at the McLaren Technology Centre alongside the XP5 F1 prototype and the 1995 Le Mans-winning F1 GTR.

Is the design genuinely new?

"People have said the McL 6GT doesn't look like a McLaren," Gregory said. His rebuttal is that critics are reading too little history. The straight-sided oval tail lights and rear-window air vents echo the same motif as the McLaren F1; the square seat quilting comes from the 1969 car; the simplified badge is a 'wordmark' based on the hand-painted sign above the McLaren family's service station in Remuera, New Zealand.

"We start with the proportions. You need to know it's a McLaren without looking at the badge," Curic said. Gregory added: "We moved the high-temperature radiators to the front, rather than at the sides like most supercars, to preserve the purity of the design." Repackaging cooling hardware is an expensive way to protect a silhouette, which suggests the intent is genuine rather than cosmetic.

The studio itself mixes old and new methods. Full-size clay models — "British clay modellers are the best in the world," Gregory said — sit alongside Apple Vision Pro augmented reality goggles that render the car in millimetre-perfect 3D, shifting seamlessly as reviewers walk around it. A bespoke interior buck with two seats and a steering wheel lets designers test a driver's eye view before any physical prototype exists.

What about the manual gearbox?

The biggest buzz at Monterey concerned the gearbox: the first manual fitted to a road-going McLaren since the F1, with an exposed linkage and a hollowed-out gear knob on a stubby lever. "We obsess over tactility, including how the gearshift feels," Curic said. "Ordinarily, you can interact with our cars without ever taking your hands off the steering wheel. The McL 6GT is a bit different." A manual will almost certainly be slower around a circuit than a dual-clutch alternative. McLaren is betting desirability beats lap times — a bet that rests on the rise of the restomod (modernised classic cars) and growing buyer disillusionment with high-tech supercars.

Details elsewhere reinforce the analogue pitch: a buttonless steering wheel, rocker switches beside the instrument binnacle for drive modes, a visible carbon tub behind the butterfly doors, and a long throttle pedal in anodised 'Papaya' aluminium. The 'speedy kiwi' logo sits on the exposed fuel filler — "so beautiful, it could be an object in your living room," Curic said.

The unresolved questions

McLaren has not publicly disclosed a price for the McL 6GT, yet it is a safe bet all 500 cars are already sold. That tells you about scarcity economics, not about whether the new design direction can scale. The real test is the McL 820 in 2027, which could either borrow the 6GT's philosophy or revert to being an evolution of the 750S. And applying this heritage language to an SUV — a vehicle type with no McLaren precedent — remains an unsolved problem.

Curic's own framing is the most quotable: "It answers the question: 'What would Bruce McLaren drive today?'" Whether enough buyers in 2028 care what Bruce McLaren would have driven is the gamble Woking has now taken.