The Quail 2026: the manual transmission is officially back

The Quail has always been the day of Monterey Car Week where the manufacturers show their hand. Pebble Beach is judged history. The auctions are a scoreboard. Friday on the lawn at Quail Lodge is where the industry says what it thinks you'll want next, and this year it said something worth writing down.

Count the gearboxes. Of the cars that made their debut at The Quail on Friday, August 14, eight had a manual transmission. Not as a heritage trim. Not as a special-order box buried three pages into the configurator. As the only way the car is built.

That is not nostalgia. That is a segment correcting itself.

The manual transmission was the real story of The Quail 2026

Here is the list, because the list is the argument:

1. Gordon Murray Special Vehicles S1 — 4.2-liter Cosworth V12, six-speed manual, central driving position
2. McLaren McL 6GT — V8, rear-wheel drive, three pedals, the first proper manual McLaren since the F1
3. Hennessey Blackbird — naturally aspirated 6.2-liter V8, six-speed gated manual, under 3,000 lbs dry
4. Eccentrica V12 Roadster — Diablo restomod, 5.7-liter V12, 550 hp, six-speed gated manual, 19 built
5. Gunther Werks GXR-Evo — 993-based, 4.0-liter flat-six, 455 hp, six-speed manual, 15 built
6. RUF Ehra — twin-turbo 3.6-liter flat-six, 650 hp, seven-speed manual, carbon monocoque
7. Spyker C8 Preliator XXV — 789 hp, manual with the shift linkage left exposed on purpose
8. Porsche 911 Carrera S MT Package — 473 hp, six-speed, lightweight battery, less sound deadening, $169,450

Two of those are seven-figure cars whose entire pitch is that a computer is not doing the shifting. One of them is a Porsche you can walk into a dealership and order. That spread is the interesting part — the manual is no longer a collector affectation at the top of the market. It has a price ladder now.

We wrote about this in July when Ferrari brought back three pedals with the 12 Cilindri Manuale, and the reasonable read at the time was that Maranello had found a clever way to charge for a delete option. Eight cars on one lawn in August is a different kind of evidence. The manufacturers didn't follow Ferrari. They all arrived at the same place independently, which usually means the customer got there first.

Gordon Murray's S1 is the car everyone came for

The reveal happened at 11:45 in the morning, hosted by Gordon Murray and three-time Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti, with a Le Mans GTR XP1 prototype and a handful of customer T.50s parked alongside it. Gordon Murray Automotive's own release frames it as a Special Vehicles creation rather than a new model line, which undersells it.

The S1 runs a 4.2-liter Cosworth V12 making up to 681 horsepower and revving to 12,100 rpm, with around 369 lb-ft of torque and — this is the tell — most of it available low in the range. Murray built the S1 LM as a track special and then softened the suspension, added integrated active rear aero, and pointed this one at long-distance touring. Central driving position, six-speed manual, 64 examples.

All 64 were sold before the covers came off.

That is the number worth sitting with. A car with no automatic option, no hybrid system, and no lap-time claim sold out ahead of a public reveal. Murray has spent thirty years arguing that mass is the enemy and that the driver should be doing more of the work, and the market just paid him in advance for the sixty-fifth time.

McLaren's first three-pedal car since the F1

The McL 6GT is a concept, and concepts lie. But the spec sheet is specific in the way that real programs are: V8, rear-wheel drive, carbon-fiber monocoque, hydraulic steering, and a manual gearbox, with production slated for 2028 and pricing expected north of a million. It's a design homage to Bruce McLaren's 1969 M6GT, the road car he was developing when he died.

Hydraulic steering in 2028 is arguably the bolder claim than the manual. Electric power steering won because it's cheaper, lighter, and lets you tune assist by drive mode. Going back to hydraulic is a decision to spend weight and money on feel, and it costs you nothing at the auto show but a lot on the balance sheet.

It also lands strangely against the 788HS and the end of McLaren's V8 era — the company spent last year telling everyone the twin-turbo V8 was finished, then brought a V8 GT with a stick to Monterey. Read that however you like. The charitable version is that Woking figured out which part of its history people actually pay for.

The featured classes said the same thing

The Quail's four honored classes this year were the 100th anniversary of Route 66, the Lamborghini Diablo, the Legacy of Japanese GTs, and the Ferrari F40. Set the Route 66 centennial aside as the civic one. The other three are a Diablo, an F40, and a lawn of Supras, NSXs, and GT-Rs.

Every one of those cars is analog, and every one of those cars is currently expensive.

The organizers pick featured classes a year out, which means this alignment was luck rather than curation. It still worked. You could stand on the Quail lawn and see a 1990 Diablo twenty feet from Eccentrica's V12 Roadster — a Diablo restomod with a gated six-speed and 19 build slots — and the newer car was making the older car's argument for it. The full run of Monterey debuts had plenty of hybrid hypercars in it too, and we covered the auction side of the week — including the $4.57M Chiron Super Sport — in our Monterey recap. But the Friday lawn skewed hard toward cars you operate rather than cars you deploy.

What a gated shifter changes about shooting these cars

This is where it stops being trivia for us.

A car with a manual gearbox photographs differently, and not for sentimental reasons. Three things change:

The interior becomes a subject. An open-gate shifter is the rare piece of car interior that reads at a glance in a still frame — geometry, machined metal, a clear function. Paddles don't do that. On a car like the Blackbird or the Eccentrica, the shifter is the detail shot that sells the whole car, and it wants a 50mm or 85mm at wide aperture with light raking across the gate rather than hitting it flat.

The driver becomes visible. In a rolling shot, you can see a driver working a manual. The hand leaves the wheel. There is a moment mid-shift where the body language is doing something, and it lands in a frame in a way that a paddle pull never will. That's a reason to shoot tighter than you normally would from the chase car and to hold the sequence longer — the shift is the moment, and you don't get to schedule it.

The audio track stops being a mono block. For video work, a manual gives you actual structure: load, break, load. If you're cutting a piece around one of these cars, the gearbox is your edit rhythm, and you'll want clean audio passes that aren't slaved to whatever the picture car was doing on the visual take.

Most of our archive is turbo, dual-clutch, modern — the Rollers frames in the store skew that way because that's what the client base drives. But the cars that came out of Carmel on Friday suggest the next few years of San Diego driveways will have a few more three-pedal cars in them, and the shot list changes when they do.

If you've got one — an F40, a Diablo, a 993 that somebody at Gunther Werks has been through, or just a 911 that came with the MT package — that car deserves to be photographed moving. Tell us what you're driving and we'll figure out the road.