I blame my friend Nick for all of this. He’s the owner of a great sales and resource website for all things vintage watches. Specifically Seiko, but there are also other brands discussed and sold as well. Nick and I first met virtually via Instagram when I managed to win an old Seiko he was offering as a giveaway. It’s a simple, great mechanical watch from the 70s, and it started me on this silly path. A path that’s boring to many yet fascinating and neverending for others. It’s the intersection of cars and watches, and it’s where I find myself today.
There’s a lot of crossover in these worlds. Watch brands love to sponsor drivers, teams, and even whole series events. There are watches made to commemorate a given model or vehicular milestone. A good timepiece pairs wonderfully with a great drive or cool vehicle. It’s both natural and occasionally effortless, yet it can also be overthought. But it’s fun, for sure. The best part is that it absolutely doesn’t need to get expensive. It certainly can. Wildly so, even. But there are plenty of ways to partake without ruining your bank account.
Back to Nick, though, as his first taste of this game turned on an unused section of my brain. Now I’m taking a deeper dive into the space, and I like what I see. I am beginning to be a bit of a nerd about it, too. Much as I used to make fun of folks obsessing over model codes for a given vehicle (997, E30, S14, etc), I now hunt for specific numbers myself. Take the numeric string 6139, for example. It’s the name of a Seiko movement that is the first automatic chronograph in the world. It’s been housed in a range of similar watch shapes that have been worn by astronauts in space, racing drivers, Bruce Lee, and Nick Mason. That breadth of appeal and functionality is fascinating to me.
The version of the 6139 I’ve just acquired has a Tachymeter function on it. You can use the watch to derive constant or average speeds. The stopwatch-like function ticks off when you start it. Then you stop it after covering a given distance, and you can determine your speed. It’s accurate enough that astronaut Colonel William Pogue used it to time engine burns in space. This is a watch you can pick up today for far less than other automotive or aerospace-related watches from brands like Rolex, Omega, Tag Heuer, and so on. There’s even a great story of a Movado that’s been to space.
Sometimes you gamble on a watch, though, and it turns out to be a dud. But if it’s an inexpensive gamble, there’s little harm done. A few years back, Nismo partnered with Seiko to create a watch commemorating the East-Africa Rally Safari Z. The idea sounds great, and a limited-edition watch should be appealing, right? I snagged one as a collector piece that I was hoping to flip down the road. Randomly, I went back to the website set up to sell the watches, and I believe of the 240 offered for sale, there were still well over 100 available to purchase. Today, the site is down, so I can’t see where the bulk of the watches are, but if you want, I’d sell it for cheap. Otherwise, it will sit in my slowly growing collection as a reminder that not everything limited in production is valuable. I’m not mad about it either, as it’s part of the fun and learning process of this world of watches.
Do you have any favorite watches that are somehow related to the automotive space? Or does the idea of talking about watch stuff make your eyes glaze over?