Horology and horse power: Car firms are getting in bed with watch brands
Cars and watches are the ultimate partnership – and one that’s only getting stronger in the digital age, says Adam Hay-Nicholls
Revolutions per minute. We could be talking about pistons punching inside a V8 engine, causing 30,000 explosions every sixty seconds. Or we could be discussing a hand on a chronograph sweeping the watch face in the time it takes another hand to click once. Timepieces and combustion automobiles are both slaves to RPM.
One may live in a garage, the other on a wrist but both are objects of desire. One measures time, the other devours it. They’re both motorised status symbols celebrated for the precision of their engineering. A Vacheron Constantin has as much to do with telling the time as a Ferrari does to getting from A to B. It is little wonder that the two go together so well.
The motor car has relied on accurate time keeping since the first tyre met tarmac, and motorsport is inseparable from the stopwatch. A race is measured not in laps or miles but in fractions of a second, with the difference between victory and defeat often less than a blink. Before the advent of electronic timing, mechanical chronographs were indispensable tools. Drivers would measure lap times with them, team managers would pace their cars by them and spectators could track the action with a glance at their wrists.
Heuer (before it became TAG Heuer) was one of the first brands to see the opportunity. Long before the war, Heuer supplied timing instruments for sports cars and aircraft, and by the 1950s its dashboard-mounted stopwatches were a fixture in rally cars. When the Carrera Panamericana roared across Mexico in the 1950s, Jack Heuer, the great grandson of the Swiss founder, was inspired to immortalise the race with a watch collection. The Carrera Chronograph – clean, legible, purposeful – became the template for generations of racing watches. The square-faced Heuer Monaco followed in 1969, and cemented its legendary status in 1971 when Steve McQueen wore it in the movie Le Mans.
Beyond utility, watches have long borrowed aesthetic cues from vehicles. Dials echo dashboards; bezels mimic tacheometers; cases adopt the curves of Scaglietti bodywork. In the 1920s, Cartier created the Tank watch, which was inspired by the caterpillar tracks of the Renault FT light tank. A decade later, Swiss brands began producing ‘driver’s watches’, with the dial angled so one could read the time without taking a hand off the wheel.
The post-war boom saw both cars and watches become aspirational commodities. Just as the Jaguar E-Type was hailed as the most beautiful car ever made, watches like the Omega Speedmaster and Rolex Daytona were celebrated as symbols of masculinity and modernity. The Daytona was named after the famed racetrack in Florida, and its chronograph layout was designed to appeal to petrolheads. The actor and racer Paul Newman’s personal Daytona would go on to become the most expensive wristwatch ever sold at auction, hammering down at £13.2 million in 2017.
From the 1980s onwards, collaborations between car and watch brands became increasingly common, each reinforcing the other’s prestige. Breitling partnered with Bentley, producing oversized watches with knurled bezels reminiscent of the marque’s brightwork. Hublot paired with Ferrari, crafting bold designs in carbon fibre and ceramic that echoed the Prancing Horse’s bleeding-edge technology.
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TAG Heuer has remained synonymous with motorsport, and recently returned as official timekeeper of Formula One. It partnered with McLaren for decades, but is now with Red Bull Racing. Richard Mille is linked to Ferrari and McLaren, and hotshots Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris have both fallen foul of RM-targeting thieves.
Featherweight innovation is epitomised by the Mille-Ferrari collaboration. The RM UP-01 Ferrari, released in 2022, was at that time the thinnest mechanical watch ever made – just 1.75mm. It’s an absurd demonstration of micro-engineering, the horological equivalent of Ferrari’s 499P hybrid hypercar, which won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Some 150 RM UP-01 Ferrari are being manufactured, priced at almost £1.4 million each.
Other tie-ins trade on heritage and romance. Chopard has sponsored Italy’s glamorous Mille Miglia since 1988, releasing annual editions of its collab chronograph inspired by the historic rally from Brescia to Rome and back again. British watchmaker Bremont has celebrated Jaguar’s E-Type, while Zenith has collaborated with Range Rover on understated yet rugged Defy pieces.
Seiko unveiled a new Prospex Speedtimer in August that honours the Datsun 240Z (£880), the popular Japanese fastback, both having been born in 1969. Designed in Britain but made in Switzerland, Aera is a relatively new brand that delivers contemporary style and robust artisanship. They’ve twinned with UK Porsche restomod specialist Rennsport to produce a 25-piece limited edition, the C-1 Rennsport Chronograph (£2,250). Porsche purists on a slightly smaller budget may find their attention grabbed by the GT3-esque colour palette of an Omologato Weissach (£350), christened after the Baden-Wüttemberg town where Porsche has secretly developed its sports, racing and hypercars since 1971.
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To owners of these cars, or simply those that aspire to own them, these watches represent their favourite automobile in miniature form. But in the case of the Jacob & Co Bugatti collection, there is nothing miniature about the price. The Bugatti Tourbillon Baguette, for example, boasts 419 diamonds and can be yours for £822,500. Normally, watches get named after cars, but in this case it’s the other way around. The upcoming Bugatti Tourbillon will enter production next year as the successor to the Chiron. Limited to 250 units, the 1,775bhp V16-hybrid hypercar has an estimated top speed of 277mph. The price? About four of Jacob the Jeweller’s watches.
The most successful collaborations are those that transcend marketing. Consider the bond between Rolex and endurance racing. Rolex has been title sponsor of the 24 Hours of Daytona since 1992, and the Daytona chronograph’s name predates that partnership by decades. To win a Rolex at Daytona or Le Mans means more than the trophy: it’s an instant heirloom, proof of mastery over man, machine and time itself.
Another more recent example is the partnership between IWC and Mercedes-AMG. IWC’s clean and functional designs align perfectly with AMG’s Teutonic power. Their joint special editions, such as Ingenieur AMG, fuse titanium cases with automotive materials and aesthetics. Then there’s Porsche Design, established in 1972 by Ferry Porsche, the man who created the 911. His first watch, the Chronograph 1, was the world’s first all-black wristwatch, echoing the matte dashboards of his cars. Last year, Porsche celebrated 50 years of the 911 Turbo with a new timepiece steeped in Bauhaus philosophy: the £10,950 Chronograph 1 50 Years 911 Turbo Edition, limited to 500 units.
As the automotive world shifts towards electrification and telling the time is most commonly done with smartphones and smartwatches, one might ask whether the traditional synergy between cars and watches is becoming obsolete. But the evidence suggests otherwise. As the mainstream becomes digital and disposable, connoisseurs instead crave the analogue and the enduring. A mechanical watch, like the Bugatti Tourbillon’s naturally-aspirated V16, is an act of defiance in an age of algorithms. It’s not the most practical way to tell the time, or the most efficient way to travel, but it is the most soulful.
Together, watches and wheels embody our contradictory relationship with time: the urge to outrun it, and the desire to preserve it.