Gear Patrol

Today, the Daytona is one of Rolex’s most popular models, and no one is surprised when a rare vintage model achieves a half-million dollar hammer price at auction. This is ironic, because not that long ago, Rolex dealers could hardly give these models away. It’s not too often that a watch goes from a sales dud to a piece for which people will wait years (just for the honor of paying full retail price), but that’s what makes the Daytona such a fascinating story.

Wheels and gears, second hands and tach needles, power trains and power reserves. Men have always been fascinated by time, speed, accuracy and power — and the beautiful combination of high-end timepieces and exotic roadgoing automobiles captures these obsessions appropriately. And whether the watch of choice is used to measure lap splits or to simply echo the same kind of quality and heritage as his car, you can be assured that careful time was taken to select both. We match up some of the best in timekeeping and automobilia in Gear Patrol style.

The Heuer Carrera can be summed up in one word: legible. When Jack Heuer, the great-grandson of Heuer’s founder, decided to introduce a new line of chronograph watches in 1963, ease of reading was the foremost design goal. Taking inspiration from the dashboard dials of racing cars, Jack developed what is arguably one of the best-looking chronographs ever made. These were watches designed to be worn on the track and in the cockpit of the world’s fastest cars, and many of the best drivers of the 1960s and 1970s chose Heuers. This was a time before brand ambassador programs paid celebrities to wear their watches; drivers like Mario Andretti, Gilles Villeneuve, Clay Regazzoni, Jochen Rindt, Niki Lauda, and Jo Siffert wore Heuers just because they liked them.

When the Mercury program started putting men in orbit, American astronauts largely chose their own watches to wear. John Glenn strapped a Heuer stopwatch to his wrist and Scott Carpenter wore a specially-modified Breitling known as the Cosmonaute. But by the 1960s, NASA saw a need to qualify every piece of vital equipment in the capsule, and the wristwatch was one of them. Wally Schirra had already worn his own OMEGA Speedmaster on his Mercury-Atlas 8 mission in 1962, and it was included in a quiver of chronographs selected by NASA for rigorous testing. Subjected to extreme temperature fluctuations, violent shocks, vibrations, vacuum and humidity, the Speedmaster outperformed watches from the likes of Rolex, Wittnauer and Longines to be named NASA’s approved timepiece. It was March 1st, 1965.

Introduced at the dawn of the jet age, the Rolex GMT-Master has become an enduring symbol of a time when travel was both more glamorous and more adventurous. This most colorful of Rolexes, transcended its aviation beginnings and has been worn by astronauts, test pilots, a famous TV detective, a Bond girl and a sports…

Seiko watches have a long and impressive history: the company produced their first watches in 1924 and have continuously produced wrist watches till this day. While often exempt from the conversation about fine timepieces that is typically reserved for German and Swiss pedigrees, Seiko takes quality very seriously. While they now produce some parts overseas…

Everybody and his grandmother knows who Rolex is. They’ve done such a wonderful job marketing their brand that even folks who couldn’t care one whit about watches will swear up and down that Rolex is not just the best watch made, it’s the only watch worth considering. Period. Well, as connoisseurs of the craft, we…

In the 1960s, scuba diving’s popularity was booming, thanks almost entirely to one man: Jacques-Yves Cousteau. It was Cousteau who, along with Emile Gagnan invented the Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) known as the Aqua-Lung. It was also Cousteau, whose French-accented voiceovers and globetrotting adventures on his TV series fascinated households worldwide. And as if…

This article is Volume 2 in our special Icons series for Timekeeping, written by our guru Jason Heaton. In case you missed it, be sure to catch our first Icons article, Volume 1: Super Compressor Dive Watch. 1970 was a year of great ups and downs for the mechanical chronograph. The vaunted Omega Speedmaster helped…

When most people think of a dive watch, the first thing that comes to mind is the prototypical ratcheting bezel, with its chunky flutings and bold markers. But there was another style of diver that emerged in the early days of recreational diving and found great popularity – the Super Compressor. To be clear, the…