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  • IWC Welcomes Titanium Big Pilot To Celebrate Racing History, Nomos Once Again Aims For Color Of The Year and a Yema GMT Might Be The Best Buy Of The Year

IWC Welcomes Titanium Big Pilot To Celebrate Racing History, Nomos Once Again Aims For Color Of The Year and a Yema GMT Might Be The Best Buy Of The Year

Seriously, don't skip the Yema, it has huge value for the money

Author

Vuk Radic
April 21, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I have an update on the Tissot PRX giveaway - one of the watches has been sent out, but I tried contacting the other winner. No luck. If it’s you and you’re reading this, check your email and get back to me. If you don’t want it, or don’t get back to me soon, I’ll have to give it away to someone else. Also, new giveaway is coming next week, bigger and better.

In this issue:

  • IWC celebrates racing with a Titanium Big Pilot

  • Nomos once again aims for color of the year

  • A Habring² Doppel 38 unique piece benefits Save The Children

  • A Yema GMT might be the best buy of the year

  • And… Hublot continues collaboration with tattoo artist

Today’s reading time: 5 minutes and 58 seconds

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👂What’s new

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IWC has had a long connection with cars and racing. But only since 2004 have they dove head first into this connection with a partnership with Mercedes-AMG. IWC became the official engineering partner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team in 2013 and established its own classic racing team, IWC Racing, in 2018. To mark this connection with racing, IWC is releasing an “IWC Racing Works” limited edition based on the Big Pilot with a grade 5 titanium case.

This will be based on the true Big Pilot and not the smaller BP43, so it will be 46.2mm in diameter and 15.4mm in thickness, with a matte blasted titanium case. This is one of only a handful of Big Pilots in titanium, and will carry the reference number IW501019. On top is a convex, anti-reflective sapphire crystal and this variant gets ain increase in water-resistance from 60m to 100m.

This Big Pilot’s Watch IWC Racing Works also comes with a new dial. It combines a sunray-brushed blue base with muted markers, numerals and tracks in grey to match the titanium case. The watch is worn on a textured leather strap in blue, closed by a titanium folding clasp. Inside the case is the standard Big Pilot movement - caliber 52110, an in-house automatic movement with a double barrel and 7-day power reserve.

This will be a limited edition of 500, offered at first only in IWC flagship stores in Zurich, Dubai and Shanghai. Price is EUR 16,000.

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The Tetra line has been a staple of Nomos since the start of the brand in 1992. And from the very start it has stood out with it’s harsh square case, as well as the fantastic colors it came it, setting the basis for Nomos to be one of the best users of colored dials in the watch world.

Now they’re coming out with four new versions designed by Thomas Höhnel, a color specialist and interior designer. While the shape remains classic (29.5mm x 29.5mm) and inside is the hand-wound Alpha calibre, the faces are all but classic, all being shades of pink. The new Tetra models bear names such as Die Kapriziöse (The Capricious), with a dial in a modern nude tone, a small seconds counter in silver with a yellow hand, or Die Wildentschlossene (The Fiercely Determined), with a rose dial, silver sub-counter and yellow sub-hand. There’s also Die Unerreichbare (The Unattainable) with its silver sunburst dial, pink contrast on the sub-dial and blue sub-hand, and finally Die Fuchsteufelswilde (The Furious One) with its aubergine-toned dial and golden accents.

The watch can be had with a sapphire back to expose the movement or a solid case, and it comes on straps made of vegan velour in grey.

The new Nomos Tetra Pink models are available now and priced at $2,080 (closed back) or $2,320 (open back).

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Two years ago one of our favorite watch blogs Monochrome teamed up with Habring² to celebrate the blog’s 15th anniversary with a limited edition Montre de Souscription 1 (MDS1), which was a conventional, single-button chronograph. Now the two brands are coming together again to produce the Doppel 38 “Monochrome x Habring²” one-off that will be sold at Phillips’ upcoming Geneva auction to benefit charity.

The one-off Doppel 38 is essentially a more complex version of Monochrome’s 15th anniversary edition, the Montre de Souscription 1 (MDS1), which was a conventional, single-button chronograph. Naturally the Doppel 38 sports a split-seconds movement and consequently, a slightly thicker case, but it is aesthetically almost identical to the MDS1, having the same “salmon” dial. In any other circumstance both brands would catch some heat for re-releasing practically the same watch, but since this is a piece unique for charity, nobody will be that nitpicky.

The Doppel 38 picks up from where the MDS1 left off. Based on the Chrono-Felix, the MDS1 had a “salmon” dial with a “sector” layout reminiscent of vintage chronographs from the 1940s. The Doppel 38 features the same dial found in the MDS1, but matched with blue steel hour and minute hands, whereas the MDS1 had silver-tone hands.

The unique Doppel 38 is powered by A11R-H11, the same movement found in the standard model. It’s a hand-wound split-seconds chronograph movement developed by Habring². The keen-eyed might see that some of its architecture borrows from the Valjoux 7750, but much of it is unique enough that few parts are interchangeable between the two.

The auction will be held from May 13-14, 2023 and the estimate on the watch is CHF10,000-20,000. The lower end of the estimate is almost the same as the retail price of the regular production Doppel 38 so it shouldn’t have much trouble selling for more.

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Hey, look! It’s a new GMT! Nobody is shocked as the GMT is the complication of the year. What is shocking is that it’s not green, the most popular color of the year. Well, not that shocking, as Yema already has a green take on the GMT.

The french watchmaker Yema is updating their Navygraf Marine Nationale GMT for this year with a new colour combination and a redesigned case. The previous edition of the Yema Navygraf Marine Nationale GMT formed part of a quartet of watches supplied to the French Navy, alongside its commercial availability.

The new case measures 38.5mm in diameter and 12mm in height. The bidirectional rotating bezel has a two-tone white and blue insert with a 24-hour graduation. It comes with a double-domed sapphire crystal, a screw-down crown, a solid caseback and 300m water-resistance. The matte blue dial has also been changed, with newly styled applied indices and hour and minute hands with Super-LumiNova inserts. The central seconds hand is yellow and paired with a GMT hand in black and yellow, with an openworked triangular tip.

What’s really cool is that Yema has an in-house movement - the YEMA3000, conceived and assembled in Mortea, France. This is a nice refreshment from all the ETA and Sellita movements. The watch comes on either a stainless steel bracelet with a brushed finish and a safety folding clasp or a black FKM Viton rubber strap with a folding clasp. Additionally, Yema supplies a single-pass elastic parachute ‘Marine Nationale’ strap in blue, with a yellow stripe down the centre.

Let’s recap that - a great looking GMT, an in house movement and a choice of steel or rubber strap with an additional, great looking, elastic strap for only $1,349 on steel or $1,379 on rubber. That looks like a great buy to me.

Pre orders start now and the first batch of 300 pieces is supposed to ship by mid-June

It is available for pre-order now for a price of USD 1,349 on the steel bracelet or USD 1,379 on the FKM Viton rubber strap. The first batch of 300 pieces is scheduled to be shipped in mid-June this year.

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Hublot and tattoo artist Maxime Plescia-Buchi are back again for another, third, entry in the Sang Bleu collection, a series of watches named for Plescia-Buchi’s tattoo studios located in Los Angeles, Zurich, and London. Just like their colaboration before, the new Sang Bleu Hublots incorporate complex geometry of Plescia-Buchi’s tattoo design into the design of the watch.

Up until now, the Big Bang has been Plesia-Buchi’s preferred canvas, but that changes here with a selection of watches using the barrel shaped Spirit of Big Bang as a starting point. Hublot has released a total of five variants of the Spirit of Big Bang Sang Bleu: an all black ceramic reference, two in titanium (one with a pavé diamond set case), and two in King Gold (again, one is diamond set).

While I don’t imagine a lot of people queuing up for these watches, for the second day in a row I have to say - bravo Hublot. This is not a watch I would ever wear, but I have to give them props for allowing an outside designer to alter their watches so much. And in the process make them more interesting and appealing than what they can do in house.

The titanium version of the Spirit of Big Bang Sang Bleu has a retail price of $28,300 (without diamonds) and the ceramic is $30,400. If you choose to go gold, you’re looking at $50,400.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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⚙️Watch Worthy

A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like

“They are not the easiest indie to get your arms around, both literally and figuratively. The watches are very rare and hyper specific in their design language, and for a long time I had the sense that they might appeal to exactly the 200 or so people per year that are able to obtain a new piece, no more no less. But then the last three years happened, and every independent brand took off like a rocket ship, and since De Bethune watches kind of look like rocket ships to begin with, their rise was perhaps even steeper.”

⏲️Wait a minute

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

  • Just the other day the Pentagon announced they are tracking more than 650 potential UFOs. Which reminded me of this piece from the New Yorker on why the US government has become so interested in flying saucers.

  • Jagadish Vasudev, the Indian mystic better known as Sadhguru, has built a global following and a horde of celebrity fans like McConaughey, Will Smith and SZA. Is everything on the up and up or is this just a cult-in-the-making?

  • You might not have noticed, but Stephen Soderbergh is becoming our most prolific filmmaker. Since 2015 he has made a movie a year, and in 2019 he explained his “crackpot theories” on how moviegoing has changed. Good read.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Teddy Baldassarre visits the Longines factory. These tours of Swiss watchmaking houses never gets old.

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