Jay Leno gets behind the wheel of Bruce McLaren's ultra-rare personal 1969 M6GT street race car and shares what he thinks

Jay Leno gave his verdict after taking Bruce McLaren’s ultra-rare personal 1969 M6GT street race car out for a spin.

Leno is renowned as a car afficionado, and he’s been behind the wheel of many iconic cars in his time.

But getting to sit in the car racing driver Bruce McLaren once drove in was something special.

What would he make of the M6GT after taking it for a drive?

Jay Leno has experienced a kings share of cool cars

If anyone knows their way around a nice set of wheels, it’s Jay Leno.

He has been at the drivers seat of many cars, in all shapes and sizes and brands.

Leno got to drive the one-of-one Duesenberg, which was planned to cost more than a Rolls-Royce.

Then there was Jeff Dunham’s modified military Humvee, and the car from 1938 which gave him a close call to remember.

It seems like he’s willing to try any car, no matter what form it comes.

So you’d think after all of that he’d hard to impress.

That’s where you’re wrong.

Taking Bruce McLaren’s M6GT out for a drive

Bruce McLaren’s 1969 M6GT was intended to be a road car, with 370hp coming from a 5.7-liter Chevy small-block V8.

It’s one of two, capable of reaching 60mph in four seconds – fast for any time period, but exceptionally fast for the period in which it was made.

McLaren had won five Can-Am races in an M6A back in the late 1960s, and now he wanted to create a road version.

That’s how the M69T came to be – and he used it to do rather mundane things, believe it or not.

“He drove these cars to his race and then he went and picked up groceries,” McLaren’s Chief Design Officer Kemal Curic said.

The plan was for hundreds more to be built, but those plans never came to fruition when McLaren died in 1970.

What did Jay Leno think of Bruce McLaren’s M6GT?

A few things jumped out at Leno after he got into the car, namely the terrible turning radius and how low the car sat.

However, he did have appreciation for how the car was a hybrid in the old-school sense of the word.

“I love this era when a hybrid was American engine and a European chassis,” Leno said.

“That’s what hybrid used to mean, because you got the power, the torque, the reliability of a big American motor in a European-style suspension underneath.”

“We just took it around the block just to get a feel for it. But this is what they used to call a man’s car, you know,” Leno said.

“Incredible pressure on the clutch, incredible pressure on the steering.”

Effectively, this car was a lot of work to drive.

Despite this, Leno still laid a lot of praise onto McLaren, drawing comparisons to racing driver Phil Hill.

“Phil was a trained Packard and Jaguar mechanic, and he’s the only guy that never broke a car and never got hurt in a car and never crashed a car, because he had this great mechanical sympathy,” he said.

The car had held up after all of these years and that says a lot.