PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — McLaren revealed a long-rumored car during Monterey Car Week, and the story isn’t its sweeping lines; it’s the gearbox. 

For the first time since the outrageous McLaren F1 in 1992, a McLaren has a manual transmission, hydraulic steering, and a V8 in a car built to be experienced rather than merely driven fast.

The new MCL 6GT will be strictly limited, expensive, and, according to the CEO, is already in high demand.

“We’re probably going to do about 500 of them, and that’s it,” McLaren Automotive CEO Nick Collins said to Yahoo Finance. “So we’re thinking in the range of $1.5 million. We’ve had an incredible reaction already from the people we’re showing the car to.”

The project started with a warehouse and a bit of ingenuity. “About a year ago, our team in MSO [McLaren Special Operations] found the original molds for the M6GT in a storage warehouse,” Collins said of a 1969 project sports car. “They blew the dust off them, and we said, ‘Wow, we think we could recreate an M6GT.” 

Founder Bruce McLaren’s M6GT was a race car turned road car, a visceral creation because that was what high-performance cars were at the time. It had a manual, of course, because that’s all that existed.

Reviving one, Collins said, answered a request the company had fielded for years. 

“We’ve had customers for a long time say, ‘Please do another manual.’ There hasn’t been a manual McLaren since the F1, which is a long time. Who doesn’t love a slick gear shift or a downshift, and the connection that brings?”

McLaren has been pointed out for calling it an authentic manual, at a moment when Ferrari’s (RACE) return to the stick shift, in the 12Cilindri Manuale, is a shift-by-wire electronic setup that mimics rowing the gears.

Asked directly whether “authentic” was a jab at Maranello, Collins didn’t take the bait, but he did make his case.

“No,” he said. “But it’s definitely authentic.”

The MCL 6GT is exclusive, but Collins said it wasn’t McLaren’s highest offering. “It’s not the highest — W1 is probably the highest strata of McLaren customers,” he said. “But it’s beyond our current series offering.” 

He expects heavy personalization, but indicated that the swooping lines and homage-era lights aren’t McLaren’s new design language. It’s basically a one-off.

“We’re very quick to say it doesn’t show the future design language of the company. It’s a new expression of McLaren, playing very heavily to the historical storytelling of the brand.”

Fifteen months into the job, Collins framed the MCL 6GT as an extension of a discipline he imposed on day two: cutting production to match demand.