With the Australian Grand Prix due to take place in Melbourne in March 2025, the F.I.A. Formula One World Championship enters its 75th year. Unsurprisingly, the sport has come a long way from its first race, on an unused airfield near Silverstone in England. The whole affair back then had the air of a provincial horse race. There were tweed jackets aplenty and a refreshment tent of the sort you might find at a village fête. The race was conducted in the presence of King George VI, the future Queen Mother Elizabeth, and the Earl and Countess of Mountbatten, who sat on a hastily assembled framework of scaffolding poles with a tarpaulin stretched across the top.
All in all, very different from the spectacle of the Bahrain Grand Prix that I attended in February this year. As the winter sun dipped beneath the horizon, the infernal roar of thousands upon thousands of horsepower filled the air as the race got underway. As dusk faded into the ink-black darkness of the Arabian night, I watched the dramatically floodlit race, and the protracted post-race fireworks, from the top story of the BIC Tower, as well known in Bahrain as the Eiffel Tower is in France, and with a better light show.
My interest in motor racing is peripheral, but my fascination with the pageant of the F1 caravansaray is enduring, not least because of the watches both on and off the circuit. I have been fortunate enough to enjoy a few Bahrain Grand Prix races, and while I initially went for the cars, I keep returning for the watches. I couldn’t tell you who won the race, but I have a clear memory of the watches worn.
No matter that your phone is a more precise timekeeper, or that your usual interaction with motoring is crawling along congested city streets, high watchmaking and high-speed automobiles make a perfect marriage. I have a sexist theory that men possess a genetically installed obsession with machinery—be it a sports car or a chronograph.
And however embarrassing it may be to admit, I think anyone who has ever gotten behind the wheel of a car has, at one time or another, thought of what it must be like to live at hundreds of miles per hour, where a split second is all that lies between glory and death. Precision timing is crucial. Even though an F1 car covers about 190 miles in a Grand Prix, the margin of victory may be a fraction of a second.
I couldn’t tell you who won the race, but I have a clear memory of the watches worn.
This heady cocktail of speed, danger, and complex mechanical components—whether on the wrist or on the track—makes modern F1 a watch-spotter’s paradise. If you look carefully at the 200-m.p.h. billboard that is the contemporary F1 car, you might glimpse the name of a watchmaker: Richard Mille is with McLaren and on the wrist of Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc. Tag Heuer supports Red Bull Racing. Girard-Perregaux is the watch partner of Lawrence Stroll’s Aston Martin team. And IWC’s sponsorship of Mercedes–AMG Petronas meant that Sir Lewis Hamilton wore and advertised IWC watches, until he announced that he was transferring to Ferrari.
Plenty of other brands are jostling for precious space on driver overalls and car bodywork. Seeing my old pal Eric Pirson, C.E.O. of Tudor, in the pit lane, I inadvertently launched his new ceramic-case, blue-dial Black Bay watch by posting it on my Instagram feed.
It has been released to celebrate the brand’s first season with the romantically named Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team (happily acronymically shortened to VCARB).
Sauntering through the paddock, I bumped into Japanese motorsport-dynasty scion Mai Ikuzawa and her plus-one in his-and-her custom “Team Ikuzawa” Tag Heuer Carreras pimped by Tag’s official customizer, George Bamford. George is a man who likes to match his seersucker suits to his watches, whether it be the lime subdial of a Rowing Blazers special-edition Carrera or the pastel-pink dial of a Tag Heuer Monaco.
I was also lucky enough to encounter a collector friend wearing a true “unicorn” watch–a Patek Philippe 5970 formerly owned by Eric Clapton and distinguished by the musician’s specification of Breguet numerals rather than the regular baton hour markers. (A detail like that can make a six-figure difference to a watch’s value.)
Among the many other watches that I saw was the trophy Rolex par excellence: the Daytona Le Mans centennial edition, with square-ended indices on its subdials that recall the Paul Newman Daytona. It was on the wrist of the petrol-headed Duke of Richmond, creator of the Goodwood Festival of Speed and the Rolex-sponsored Goodwood Revival.
Rolex also sponsors Formula 1—or at least it does until next year, when LVMH begins a decade-long sponsorship deal involving a trio of its brands: Louis Vuitton (F1 needs luggage when it travels to 21 nations in a season running from March to December); Moët & Chandon (those who make it to the podium are obliged to douse each other with champagne), and, even more appositely, Tag Heuer, a move that more than revives the brand’s motor-racing heritage. It didn’t come as a total surprise; the relaunch earlier this year of Tag Heuer’s millennial-appropriate, vividly colorful, entry-level Formula 1 watch from 1986 was a bit of a giveaway.
The only shock was the money involved: neither LVMH nor the F.I.A. has released an official figure, but informed rumors speak of a sum in excess of a billion dollars. Somehow, I think that they will be entertaining their guests in surroundings more glamorous than scaffold poles and tarpaulins.
Nicholas Foulkes, the author of more than 20 books on the arts and history, is a London-based writer and editor
