McLaren teased its manual supercar with its founder's own decades-old wish
McLaren's next supercar has a manual gearbox, and a teaser just confirmed it.
McLaren released a teaser on Instagram built around the M6GT, its first road car, paired with archival audio of founder Bruce McLaren hoping for exactly this. The car, reportedly known internally as the P50, debuts on 14 August during Monterey Car Week.
What the teaser actually shows
The clip opens with footage of the M6GT, developed from the M6A Can-Am racer and built as only three prototypes, each with a five-speed manual gearbox. Over that footage plays an archival line from Bruce McLaren himself: “Somewhere down the line, I think it is bound to happen. I hope it happens.” The video then cuts to brief, deliberately unclear glimpses of the new car, which appears to share something of the M6GT's silhouette, before closing on a hand pulling back a shifter and a single date: 14 August, during Monterey Car Week.
The M6GT connection is the whole point
McLaren has form here. Earlier this year the brand's own heritage division completed a full restoration of an M6GT, the very car its founder never got to see reach proper production before his death. Leaning on that same car for this teaser is not a coincidence. It frames the new supercar as a continuation of something Bruce McLaren wanted decades ago, rather than a reaction to whatever Ferrari or Porsche happen to be doing this year.
Almost everything else is still a guess
McLaren has not confirmed the car's name, powertrain, production run or price. Reports a month earlier suggested fewer than 100 examples were planned, though that figure may have shifted given the level of interest since. It is also not clear whether the gearbox will be an old-school H-pattern manual or a shift-by-wire system that only simulates one, nor which engine it pairs with, though a V8 is the working assumption given the rest of McLaren's current range. Pricing is rumoured to land above the McLaren W1's roughly $2.1 million starting point, though McLaren has said nothing official on any of it.
Ferrari got there first, in its own way
McLaren is not first to market with this idea. Weeks earlier, Ferrari revealed the 12Cilindri Manuale, which is not a traditional mechanical gearbox at all. Underneath sits the standard eight-speed dual-clutch transmission, electronically emulating a six-speed manual complete with a real clutch pedal and gearlever, while a button reverts the same car to full automatic. Whether McLaren goes down that same shift-by-wire route or builds something more mechanical is exactly the open question here.
Not everyone is convinced
Simulated manual gearboxes are not new. Koenigsegg has used similar technology for years. But the approach is far from universal: Lamborghini has said plainly it has no plans to build a manual supercar of any kind, treating the current wave as a passing appeal to nostalgia rather than something worth engineering around.
AutoNext Take
The smart part of this teaser is not the shifter shot, it is the choice to lead with Bruce McLaren's own voice. Anyone can tease a manual gearbox. Framing it as something the company's founder was hoping for before he died is a much harder thing to fake, and it is the reason this lands differently than a generic “driver's car” pitch would.
Whether the actual gearbox turns out to be a proper mechanical unit or a clever electronic impression of one, McLaren has already won the framing battle. We will know which one it actually built in a matter of days.
