INTRODUCING: The TAG Heuer Formula 1 Indy 500 Special Edition is a circle of blacktop for your wrist
This year, TAG Heuer are celebrating more than a decade and a half of timing partnership with the celebrated NTT IndyCar Series, and are releasing a new special edition watch to mark the occasion. The TAG Heuer Formula 1 Indy 500 Special Edition was designed in close collaboration with the IndyCar team, and has a number of design cues that pay specific tribute to the legendary motorsports event. For anyone that has a soft spot for this race, it’s going to be a constant wrist-worn reminder. For those unfamiliar with the Indianapolis 500 race, it does what it says on the tin. It’s held in Indiana, and it is a gruelling 500-mile race that has been running for more than a century, attracting some of the largest sporting crowds on earth. Known among fans as “The Brickyard”, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway circuit serves as direct inspiration for this latest TAG Heuer release. Early in its life, at the beginning of the 20th century, the entire track was paved with bricks, which were chosen for their relative safety as a driving surface. Over the years, the bricks have been covered with more modern asphalt, but the start/finish line of the racetrack…
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Watching Andrew in the Virtual Baselworld 2020 recap I had a deep understanding of the distracted description of the glacial blue degradè dial of the Sixties pieces from Glashütte Original. Today I’m quietly drawn to something that is so far removed from my vintage diver tool-tastes that I am genuinely surprised. Glashütte Original is the independent child in the Swatch Group family, left to their own devices in the German mountains, with the result being a superb range of classic Germanic horology infused with a strong identity and in-house production. Their fascinating mix of strictly traditional watchmaking, in their Senator series, stretching to Haute Horlogerie with tourbillons juxtaposed with their Sixties and Seventies ranges. The latter two are recognisable by their aforementioned dazzling degradè dials with colours even the boldest of us would shy away from – then falling in love with after a closer look. In between what is a majority of quite dressy references, we have their only vintage diver, one of the categories du jour. The SeaQ is a picture-perfect version of their Spezimatic from 1969 in its pure tool form. A quietly confident skin diver in an all-brushed guise, with classic square lug openings and delicate bevels…
Coming in hot like a Ki Blast, G-Shock is expanding its releases in collaboration with the internationally renowned Dragon Ball Z franchise across the globe. And this new GA110JDB is both the ultimate wristwear for Dragon Ball Z fans, and a watch that – in general – makes perfect sense in 2020, because it’s wild. Like the standard production model, this watch is outfitted with a mineral crystal, a 200-metre water resistant case (with resistance to both magnetism and shocks), and CR1220 battery which should keep the watch running for 2 years. Its dimensions are ready for battle at 55.0mm x 51.2mm x 16.9 mm, and a weight of a mere 72g. This watch, however, is quite special and distinct from others within the lineup. It is packed with subtle, and very unsubtle, nods to the Dragon Ball Z series on practically all of the components of the watch. The orange resin case and band are covered in Dragon Ball Z illustrations and graphic elements, depicting scenes of training and growth of the series protagonist Son Goku. The orange with black streaks resembles Son Goku’s wardrobe in combat and the way in which it creases during battle. It is also…
LIV is a brand that cuts to the chase. Bold, chunky watches with action in mind, and the rare ability to come up with distinctly different designs while keeping its own unique identity consistent across its range. While their microbrand-standard Kickstarter business model may be quite common, their collections of watches and value propositions are anything but. One of the latest releases to be successfully crowdfunded raised $764,590USD more than its $30,000 goal, and it’s the tactical, brutish, yet stylish LIV P-51 Pilot’s chronograph in a wide high-grade titanium case. There’s no getting around it. The P-51 is a big, no-nonsense, bombastic pilot’s watch — the most obvious feature being its hulking dimensions of 46mm in diameter and 15.9mm thickness, though the short and straight lugs sloping downwards help increase its wearability. But, chances are, if you’re after an oversized chronograph, you’re not looking for subtlety. The legibility is, of course, perfect, with slightly stocky hands filled with white BGW9 Swiss Super-LumiNova luminous paint, and a bright orange seconds hand, white-tipped to more accurately line it up with the printed seconds track between the applied indices. Legibility is also helped by the crystal covering the dial featuring an anti-reflective coating.…
Say what you will, but there are few cooler mods you can make to a stainless steel sports watch than removing its bezel … just ask Marlon Brando. It’s obviously a sentiment that Seiko agrees with, as 2020 has seen them release no fewer than 11 new iterations of its iconic 5 Sports model without the uni-directional, ratcheting diver’s bezel. And the response? Rescapement calls them “The most important [watch] of 2020.” Seiko has replaced the functional feature with a brushed, fixed bezel with a highly polished outer lip. To our eyes, this seemingly innocuous move has completely changed the overall character of the watch – it now looks much more akin to something like a field/daily timepiece, rather than a watch geared towards marine activity. However, it isn’t the only change that these new 5 Sports bring. They’ve also shrunk from 42.5mm to just 40mm. Hallelujah. That means even more bandwidth, and for smaller-wristed fellows like myself, a much more attractive proposition. The bezel-less beauties will be made available in a number of distinct finishes, including brushed stainless steel, two-tone steel and yellow gold or pink gold or a fully blacked-out variant with a hardened coating (which looks seriously tough).…
Watchmaker Anicorn has teamed up with the most important space exploration outfit on the planet(s), NASA, to create a brand new watch that aims to celebrate the Perseverance Rover touching down in Jezero Crater on Mars. And the results? Ladies and gentleman, we bring you the most bizarre watch of 2020. Called the Mars Time, this striking hexagonal timepiece has been styled as a homage to the space traversing all-terrain vehicle, and the finished product is so out of the ordinary it looks like it could’ve been created in a bunker near Area 51. Either that or its a short stack of pieces of desiccated orange, spray-painted white within a hexagonal fruit bowl. It’s all in the eye of the alien beholder. The case Mind you, though, while the 42mm (12.5mm thick) satin-brushed 316L steel case is positively futuristic, its hexagonal shape is one that really fits within the extraterrestrial theme. It’s just strange enough to be out of this world. The lugs are relatively short, but articulate downwards for comfort, and likely mean it would wear no smaller or larger than the 42mm on the spec sheet suggests. The caseback features a blued steel frame that holds the sapphire…
A neutron star is tiny, at an average 20km in diameter, but incredibly dense. Its mass is equivalent to 1.5 times our Sun – which has room for more than a million Earths. How does this set the backdrop to a review of the fêted Sinn U50 SDR, the first-ever Sinn with a waiting list? Physics and astronomy is an unusual starting point for a watch review, but stay with me…! Thanks to the generous engineers at Sinn Spezialuhren in Frankfurt, I have had the new Sinn U50 diver comfortably on my wrist for a couple of weeks, and the confusion started the moment I picked it up. Like the neutron star, it is small and rather heavy thanks to the HY 100 submarine steel construction; a compact nugget of a watch. A 40mm diver of mine on a tropic strap is 30 per cent thicker and weighs 90 grams, whereas this is a heavy 130 grams and very slender at 11mm. On its rubber strap it weighs only slightly less than my Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight on its solid steel bracelet, and that’s including the Sinn rubber being cut short to fit my twig-like forearm. In a word, it…
“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” Hunter S. Thompson was good like that. Always generous when it came to doling out whacked-out life advice. In his writing, he offered heartfelt tips on many things, from hotel liaisons (“Don’t have sex in the lobby – it’s usually awkward”) to optimised forms of hedonism (“Have an objective to give your bender a theme. For instance, stalking and killing a wild pig with a bowie knife”). This type of off-kilter wisdom reflects Thompson’s libertarian values and drug-addled life. Until these hard-living ways dulled his creative fire, he channelled this material into Gonzo journalism – an energetic form of subjective reporting that involved the writer becoming a central participant in the story. Yet what truly supercharged Thompson’s writing was his electric style, a form of hyperbolic invective that influenced countless young journalists all over the planet. On the back of his Fear And Loathing books in particular, Thompson became a countercultural hero, right up until his suicide in 2005. But given the unorthodox nature of his daily existence – the firearms, the pranks involving frozen elk hearts, the oceans of Chivas Regal –…