It’s a tight fit. I’m squeezed into the cockpit of a Formula One simulator in a basement room at the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One team’s headquarters in Brackley, England— one of three simulators the team uses to both train drivers, and softtest modifications to their cars before trying them out in the real world.

Harry Winston’s been very much in the news lately –and not just the watch news. In a surprise announcement, it was recently revealed that the company has been acquired by the Swatch Group, in a deal that reportedly totaled about $1 billion. The purchase of Harry Winston by the Swatch Group has left many enthusiasts […]

A. Lange & Söhne’s technical director, Anthony de Haas, is a tall, powerfully built man with linebacker’s shoulders, famous for both his technical prowess and self-deprecating sense of humor. We’ve listened to a number of his SIHH presentations, and over the years, heard him respond, “wait and see,” innumerable times to a question even he […]

Superlatives should be used sparingly in watchmaking –especially mechanical watchmaking, which is (to put it mildly) a mature technology, having been evolving for over five centuries; they should especially be used sparingly when characterizing mechanical innovations, which, one often suspects, are there more to give watch fans and writers something to talk and write about […]

The Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie is, as most Haute Time readers probably know, the invitation-only event held annually in Geneva during which the luxury watch companies that are part of the Richemont Group –a distinguished list that includes Piaget, IWC, Van Cleef and Arpels, and Cartier –as well as allied firms such as […]

Although it’s in retrospect one of the most logical uses for the Reverso, the first dual time-zone version came rather late in the day –though the Reverso has been around since 1931 (when, famously, it was produced at the request of a British officer’s polo club in India, in order to create a watch whose […]

One of the best known independent watch companies is also one of the smallest: Maximilian Büsser & Friends was founded by Maximilian Büsser in 2005, and though it’s solidly rooted in the Swiss watchmaking traditions of reliability and precision, you won’t find watches like these anywhere else in Switzerland –or, for that matter, in the […]

Regular Haute Time readers know what a minute repeater is: a watch that chimes the hours, quarter hours, and minutes “on demand,” it’s considered by far the most challenging of all the classic complications. Not only is it incredibly complex and delicate, it requires enormous skill to make one that not only functions accurately (for […]

2013 is the Year of the Snake in the Chinese Zodiac, in which –unlike Western astrology, where the symbolic animal changes every month –an animal reigns for an entire year. The Snake personality is calm and unruffled on the surface, but just as with an actual snake, someone born under this sign can strike without […]

Formula 1 has not had an easy time of it in the United States. Despite its huge international audience –over 500 million viewers in nearly 200 countries –it’s never quite managed to take hold here. With no US team or driver since the shutdown of the US F1 team in 2010, and with no US […]

One of the nice things about A. Lange & Söhne is how little noise they make about how much goes into their watches. Every year a few thousand timepieces –a bare handful, by the modern standards of mass luxury behemoths, who leverage their name recognition into the sale of millions of units of God knows […]

Even today, when its history should be known by anyone with pretensions to serious interest in watchmaking, Panerai is sometimes misperceived as a maker of fashionably large watches –a follower, in short, rather than a leader. Nothing could be further from the truth. Panerai began life as an instrument maker and created some of the […]