The first McLaren road car goes to auction

February 13, 2006 It was sadly many years after the death of New Zealand racing driver and automotive engineer Bruce McLaren that his dream of creating the world’s fastest road car became a reality with the McLaren F1 road car. McLaren’s legacy in all forms of racing, from winning Le Mans in the famous GT40, to creating one of the most successful Formula One teams in history, puts him among automotive history’s immortals. And now one of his most significant creations is to go under the hammer: the stillborn M6-GT, of which only two examples were ever completed by the factory. The official Bruce McLaren Trust web site chronicles the history of the car which was modeled after the McLaren M6 CanAm monocoque sports racer. The head of the McLaren design department during the development of the M6-GT was aerospace engineer Robin Herd who recalls the M6 McLaren tests and certifies it as one of the earliest examples of a ground-effects car, with the nose shaped to create negative pressure under the car. From an article on the McLaren Interntaional site, “On the day of the big test … we went all high-tech with a half-inch rubber tube taped to the bottom of the car leading to a pressure gauge which I was holding. I had crammed myself into the passenger seat and Bruce was barrelling into the first corner at Goodwood … when the gauge suddenly registered negative pressure. I had rather hoped that Bruce would be concentrating on staying on the road, but he spotted the change on the gauge and started whooping and shouting and laughing and banging my arm. We’d cracked it!”

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