Farer Releases Racing Chronograph Collection; Longines Rebuilds Master Collection; London Ispired Beda’a Angles Mecaline; Sea-Gull Polishes Its Famous Chrono; A Wild VC Traditionnelle Twin Beat QP

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Not much going on today, other than I’ll say happy birthday to my friend, Tom.

In this issue

• Farer Releases The New Racing Chronograph Collection Of Tri-Compax Chronos

• Longines Rebuilds the Master Collection From the Ground Up

• Beda’a Places Big Ben’s Typography Onto Your Wrist With The Angles Mecaline London Edition

• Sea-Gull Polishes Up Its Most Famous Chronograph With Some Great Colors And Important Updates

• Vacheron Constantin Brings Back The Traditionnelle Twin Beat QP, Now With A 70 Day Power Reserve

👂What’s new

1/

Farer Releases The New Racing Chronograph Collection Of Tri-Compax Chronos

Farer has never been a brand to chase the vintage-racing-chronograph look that so many brands keep recycling, and the new Racing Chronograph collection is the latest proof. The British brand builds watches around colour and texture, and this trio of continues this intention, while not veering into cosplay vintage territory. However, if you think you've seen it before, you're half right: the older Carnegie was made in this vein but ran a little thick. This collection is the fix.

Farer dropps the old tonneau shape for a more conventional angled-lug design, pulling the diameter down to 38.5mm wide with a lug-to-lug of 43.7mm. And while it’s not thin at 13.4mm thick, you can’t expect much from an off-the-shelf chronograph. The 316L stainless steel now mixes polished facets into the brushed surfaces, and there's a bi-directional bezel with a coloured ceramic insert plus the signature bronze-capped crown. A domed sapphire crystal sits on top with seven internal anti-reflective coatings. Water resistance is 100 meters.

Three dials, three personalities. Volante has a sky-blue sunburst with engine-turned cream subdials, an orange chronograph hand, a yellow 10-minute sector, and unusual gloss navy hands instead of the expected black. Libre is the Big Eye of the set: an oversized burgundy minute counter with a light-blue hand over a textured white dial, with alternating two-hour bezel markings rather than full numerals. Gara is the loudest of the bunch, pairing a clean silver sunburst against British Racing Green subdials and bezel with a yellow chronograph hand.

Inside is the Sellita SW510M b, a manual-wind chronograph in Élaboré grade, with better timekeeping and finishing than the standard version, visible through the caseback. Power reserve is 63 hours. Each watch can be had on a huge number of strap options, including leathers and colour-matched rubber straps in navy, green, or burgundy.

The Racing Chronograph collection is available now, priced at €2,150. See more on the Farer website.

2/

Longines Rebuilds the Master Collection From the Ground Up

The Master Collection has been Longines' default dress watch, the line you point someone toward when they want something traditional that won't embarrass them or their wallet. It has also been a bit of a mess: nine case sizes, three or four numeral styles, dials that didn't quite agree with each other. The 2026 redesign keeps the barleycorn dials and leaf hands but finally imposes some order, with twenty references in four sizes that look like they belong to the same family.

You get 30mm, 34mm, 39mm and 41mm case sizes, all sharing concave bezels, notched winding crowns, and polished finishes. The 41mm sits 9.5mm thick with 21mm lugs, and the 39mm shaves that down to 9.05mm. Water resistance is 30 meters across the board, which is exactly what you expect from a dress watch and exactly what you should not test in a pool. A sapphire caseback shows off the movement on every reference.

The dials are all new, but very familair. The barleycorn pattern has a guilloché feel, without the guilloché price, and it appears on the entire range now instead of appearing on just some of them. The 41mm and 39mm get silver or blue dials with applied Arabic numerals and either blued-steel or rhodium-plated hands. Longines uses the 41mm to do something more interesting: two references with Eastern Arabic numerals on silver barleycorn, which give the collection a more cosmopolitan look. The 34mm and 30mm shift feminine, with peripheral barleycorn printing on mother-of-pearl, 11 diamond indices, and two-tone options with yellow or rose gold-capped bezels.

The 41mm, 39mm and 34mm run the Longines calibre L888.5, with a silicon balance spring and a 72-hour power reserve, while the 30mm uses the calibre L592.5. Every reference can be ordered on a new stainless steel bracelet with a micro-adjustable folding clasp, or on leather with a folding clasp that also adjusts.

Prices run from €2,300 to €3,550. See more on the Longines website.

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Beda’a Places Big Ben’s Typography Onto Your Wrist With The Angles Mecaline London Edition

Beda'a built its name on the Angles collection, and the octagonal case has done enough business that the Maison keeps finding reasons to extend it. It’s also a very god canvas for collaborations, like this one that was shown in London at Hands on Horology on June 13. It’s a very elegant thing, as Angles collections are, and this one gets a very cool dial that uses Elizabeth Tower's clock font as inspiration.

The case is 316L stainless steel, 37mm wide and 34mm tall, which is to say it wears small and has more of a cushion shape than a round one. At 5.8mm thick it is so nicely slim. There’s a sapphire crystal on top, the lug width is 19mm, water resistance is 30 meters.

Beda'a scaled down the Elizabeth Tower's clock face and reproduced the Victorian Gothic numerals in the same typeface that appears across Big Ben's four faces, applied individually rather than printed on the dial. Around them sits an engraved relief drawn from the tower's stonework, the quatrefoil and floral details you'd see if you actually looked up at it. The color is a warm white.

Inside is the ETA 7001, a hand-wound calibre running at 3Hz with 17 jewels and roughly 42 hours of reserve. It drives hours, minutes, and a small seconds at six. The 7001 is a known, reliable manual movement and a sensible choice for a watch this thin. The watch comes on stitched alligator leather with a pin buckle.

The Beda'a Angles Mecaline London Edition (Ref. BQAM0525-37) is priced at CHF 1,245, limited to 50 pieces, and goes on sale in August 2026. See more on the Beda’a website.

4/

Sea-Gull Polishes Up Its Most Famous Chronograph With Some Great Colors And Important Updates

The Sea-Gull 1963 is one of the few affordable mechanical chronographs with a real story behind it, descended from a pilot's watch made for the Chinese Air Force in the early 1960s and powered by a movement whose tooling Sea-Gull bought from Venus. The new 1963 Premium collection is the most thorough update the model has had. If you've wanted to like the 1963 but found the execution rough, this is the version you might want to look at.

The case measures 37.30mm wide and a hefty 15mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47mm. That thickness is the elephant in the room, and no amount of finishing fixes it, but Sea-Gull has at least dressed the stainless steel up properly this time with brushed flanks against polished bezel and top surfaces. A sapphire crystal finally replaces the old mineral glass, and the redesigned exhibition caseback gets a larger window. Water resistance is a modest 50 meters.

The dial range is wider than before. The off-white and panda layouts that built the model's reputation are still here, joined by textured and gradient dials in blue, green, and pink, plus a 500-piece limited edition pairing a black meteorite main dial with white meteorite sub-dials. Applied markers alternate Arabic numerals with triangular indexes, and the hand sets change with each variant.

Inside is the upgraded ST-1901 Top Grade, the same column-wheel, 30-minute, hand-wound chronograph beating at 3Hz with 22 jewels and a 50-hour reserve, now given Sea-Gull's best finishing to date. Expect a rhodium-plated monochrome look, finer Geneva stripes, and hand-finished bevels visible through the new caseback. It ships on a leather strap with a steel pin buckle, and the 18mm lugs make swaps easy.

Standard models start at €735.95, with the meteorite limited edition at €1,169.95. It’s a bit of a pain to track these watches down on the many Sea-Gull websites, but have a look here if you want to start your search.

5/

Vacheron Constantin Brings Back The Traditionnelle Twin Beat QP, Now With A 70 Day Power Reserve

When Vacheron Constantin launched the Traditionnelle Twin Beat Perpetual Calendar in 2019, it solved the oldest annoyance in perpetual calendars: forget to wind one and you're left resetting the day, date, month, and leap year with a pin and a lot of patience. The Twin Beat got around this with two balance wheels in one movement, letting you flip the watch into a slow-running Standby mode that kept the calendar accurate for 65 days while you left it in a drawer. Vacheron has now extended that figure to 70 days and reworked the finishing to feel more current. And boy, is this a watch…

The case is polished platinum at 42mm wide and 12.3mm thick, which is absolutely tiny given what’s happening inside. A pusher at 8 o'clock switches between the 5Hz Active mode and the 1.2Hz Standby mode without breaking the energy chain. Sapphire crystals sit on top and bottom, and you get 30 meters of water resistance.

The dial keeps the layout of earlier versions with a couple of meaningful changes. The top half is a slate-grey ruthenium-coated gold plate with a radiating hand-guilloché pattern, while the lower sapphire section opens onto the sandblasted mainplate. The power reserve indicator sits at 12 (red for Standby, black for Active), with day and month counters at 6, and these have been given a frosted look through laser-etched sapphire. White gold baton markers and an engraved railway minute track carry over unchanged.

Inside is the manual-winding calibre 3610, 6mm thick despite packing in 480 components, 64 jewels, and two regulators. The display caseback shows both balance wheels mounted side by side, the smaller 5Hz on the left and the larger 1.2Hz on the right, plus the yoke that locks one and frees the other. Power reserve is 70 hours on the Standby balance and 4 days on the regular one. This is a completely redesigned calendar mechanism that now snaps over at midnight instead of dragging through it. The fixed dark-grey NAC components against the moving golden parts make for a movement worth staring at. It comes on a textured calfskin strap with red stitching and a platinum pin buckle.

The Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Twin Beat Perpetual Calendar is part of the permanent collection, though production capacity keeps it limited in practice. Price is CHF 282,000 including tax. See more on the Vacheron Constantin website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• “The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar,” wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. A garbageman, then, lives closest to truth. Simon Paré-­Poupart digs deep into the stinking, honest pile of his day-to-day work as a garbageman in Quebec, drawing on Hugo and Descartes and Georges Bataille to illuminate the outlaw character and righteous cultural criticism of a job he clearly relishes. By the way, if your garbageman dents your trash can and throws it haphazardly into your yard, he is trying to tell you something.

• For The Atlantic, Ian Bogost writes an ode to the 747, the Boeing Company’s over 50-year-old queen of the skies. After kicking off the era of mass intercontinental travel upon launch in 1970, Boeing ceased production in 2023, as airlines turned to a hub and spoke model of travel that flourished with more frequent flights using smaller, more fuel-efficient aircraft.

• The house at 2–8A Rutland Gate in Westminster last sold for a staggering £210m. Yet the only person who lives there resides on its porch, in a tent made mostly from umbrellas. For three years, Anders Fernstedt has lived in this makeshift home, while the house’s owners are mired in a financial controversy that means they cannot sell. It’s a stark and unsettling representation of inequality in England: a homeless man camped outside a 45-room mansion that stands empty behind him

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