TAG Gives The Monaco An Incredible BRG Dial; Seiko's Piece Unique For Ohtani; Breitling Pays Homage To Eddy Merckx; Sartory-Billard Marks America's 250th; Ferdinand Berthoud's FB 3SPC In Gold

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Finally, Friday. That’s all. Enjoy the weekend.

In this issue

• TAG Heuer Gives The Monaco An Incredible British Racing Green Dial For Goodwood

• Seiko Builds A Piece Unique For Shohei Ohtani, Counting Down How Much Time He Has Left

• Breitling Pays Homage To Legendary Cyclist Eddy Merckx With A Yellow Jersey Themed Top Time

• Sartory-Billard Marks America's 250th With An Exposed Copper Dial Jump-Hour

• Ferdinand Berthoud Reworks the FB 3SPC in 5N Gold, And It’s Still Very, Very Nice

👂What’s new

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TAG Heuer Gives The Monaco An Incredible British Racing Green Dial For Goodwood

TAG Heuer is back as Official Timing Partner of the Goodwood Festival of Speed this year, and I recently wrote about the Formula 1 Chronograph x Goodwood Festival of Speed limited edition that was a U.K. exclusive. A fine watch. What I didn’t see coming is this new limited Monaco Chronograph in the most predictable color imaginable — British Racing Green. But my god, what an execution of the color…

The case is the familiar Monaco with the crown at 3 o'clock rather than the 9 o'clock "Steve McQueen" layout. Made out of steel, it measures 39mm wide, 15mm thick, with a 47mm lug-to-lug. A bevelled sapphire crystal sits on top, there's a sapphire caseback, and water resistance is 100 meters.

But that dial... The base is British Racing Green lacquer with a sunray brush, and the sub-dials and the circular minute ring are beige, a classic green-over-tan combination that you would expect to see on a vintage roadster. TAG has scattered a few racing details through it: a checkered flag on the tip of the seconds hand, red sub-dial hands, and a red marker at 39 seconds nodding to the current Hillclimb record set by the McMurtry Spéirling in 2022.

Inside is TAG Heuer's Calibre TH20-00, an automatic integrated chronograph with a column wheel and vertical clutch, running at 4 Hz with 80 hours of power reserve. The Goodwood FOS logo sits on the rotor, visible through the sapphire back. It's worn on a brown perforated leather strap in the same vintage register as the dial.

The TAG Heuer Monaco Chronograph x Goodwood Festival of Speed 2026 is limited to 71 pieces and priced at GBP 7,750, available only from the brand's booth at the Festival. See more on the TAG Heuer website.

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Seiko Builds A Piece Unique For Shohei Ohtani, Counting Down How Much Time He Has Left

Shohei Ohtani asked a question a few years ago that most of us ask in less well-compensated terms: how much time do I have left doing the thing I love? He's been a Seiko ambassador in Japan for a decade now, and rather than mark the occasion with an engraved caseback, Seiko spent roughly three years building him a mechanical watch that tracks cumulative running time up to one million hours. Of course, building a watch that would track an exact time left, either in his career or his life, would be a bit morbid, which is why I assume Seiko went with a million hours, or about 114 years. It’s still counting down, but gives the wearer a bit of a buffer.

The case is made out of high-intensity titanium, 41.8mm wide and a substantial 17.4mm thick. But there’s a reason for that thickness. Instead of hands, the watch uses five stacked discs, and discs are far taller than the flat printed dial and thin hands they replace, so Seiko had to develop a new movement and case structure specifically to keep the thing from turning into a hockey puck. It’s still thick, but they managed to hide it well. A box-shaped sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on the inner surface caps it, and water resistance is a sensible 100 meters.

The five discs each cover a range: 24 hours, 1,000 hours, 10,000 hours, 100,000 hours, and one million. The innermost 24-hour disc doubles as the time display, so the watch still tells you what time it is while also quietly logging how long it has been alive. Each disc carries a set diamond.

The movement is bespoke to this watch, reworked from the ground up to accommodate the disc stack, and Seiko hasn't shared calibre details, beat rate, or power reserve. The strap is silicone, cut to a custom length for Ohtani's wrist.

The Seiko Star Time is a one-of-a-kind creation and is not for sale. Which is truly a shame. See more on the Seiko website.

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Breitling Pays Homage To Legendary Cyclist Eddy Merckx With A Yellow Jersey Themed Top Time

The Tour de France started the other day and it’s already a pretty interesting affair. However, right before the start, Breitling jumped on the ever increasing trend of tying watches to cycling. A trend I’m fully in approval of. Jumping on the trend is not a good choice of words, because Breitling released op Time tributes to Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali last year. Even before that, in the 19th century, Breitling built stopwatches for competitive cycling and its equipment timed official races. Now, we’re getting a Top Time that pays tribute to Eddy Merckx, one of the greatest riders of all time.

The stainless steel case is 41mm wide, a not-too-thick 13.3mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 50.36mm. On the side you’ll find classic mushroom pushers. Through the sapphire caseback you get the movement alongside an "Eddy Merckx Tribute" inscription, with "One of 525" engraved to mark his career win total. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is yellow, and you know why it is. This is a Tour de France watch, and the color is a direct nod to the maillot jaune worn by the race leader. The dial is surrounded by a white tachymeter scale, and the same color is used on the signature Top Time squircle sub-dials. Merckx's signature is tucked discreetly above 6 o'clock.

Inside is Breitling's in-house calibre B01, a COSC-certified automatic chronograph running at 4Hz with a 70-hour power reserve. You can have it on a perforated black leather racing strap with white stitching or a steel mesh bracelet. Neither is ideal for actually riding hard, but we’ll live.

The Breitling Top Time B01 Eddy Merckx is limited to 525 and available now, on leather for €7,400 or mesh for €7,800. See more on the Breitling website.

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Sartory-Billard Marks America's 250th With An Exposed Copper Dial Jump-Hour

The 4th of July and the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States has passed, so this watch might not make much sense now if it weren’t for two things: I didn’t see it before today and it’s still available for sale. And it’s quite cool. Recently, Sartory-Billard has been making incredibly cool use of materials, especially on the SB10 jump hour that often uses the dial plate to make a statement. On the SB10 250th Anniversary is made out of raw copper, with an engraving of the American flag.

The case is 39.5mm wide and 11.5mm thick in 316L stainless steel, with a lug-to-lug of 44mm. Those are pretty good dimensions. The case has alternating brushed and polished surfaces and there’s technically a sapphire crystal on top. Only, here the sapphire is a strip around the edge, and the center is taken up by the copper plate (SB doesn’t call it a dial plate, instead they say it’s a cabochon) which is exposed to the world, allowing you to touch the engraving.

The cabochon is the reason to buy this watch. American dial maker Ron Elkins CNC-engraved the Stars and Stripes into the copper, varying depth and direction so the flag appears as fabric caught in wind. Then Scottish artist Chris Alexander, also known as The Dial Artist, then patinates it by hand, developing a process specifically to preserve Elkins' detail. A transparent lacquer seals it, and as that lacquer wears through daily contact the copper underneath keeps evolving on its own.

Time is told without a single hand. A jumping hour sits in an oversized aperture at 6 o'clock with a sapphire disc showing the hours in a custom typeface, and a second sapphire disc rotates a Super-LumiNova BGW9 ring around the cabochon once an hour, with a red marker indicating minutes. Inside is the Swiss La Joux-Perret G101A automatic with a patented Sartory-Billard jumping-hour module and 55 hours of reserve. It ships with three rubber straps in red, white and blue.

The SB10 250th Anniversary is available to order only between July 4 and July 11, 2026, with first deliveries at the end of the year, and price is set at €5,200 without tax. See more on the Sartory Billard website.

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Ferdinand Berthoud Reworks the FB 3SPC in 5N Gold, And It’s Still Very, Very Nice

Ferdinand Berthoud is Karl-Friedrich Scheufele's other project, the one where Chopard's co-president gets to chase pure chronometry without a commercial leash. Since reviving the name in 2015, the brand has put out the fusée-and-chain FB1, the FB2, and then the FB 3SPC, which won the Chronometry prize at GPHG 2023 on the strength of a variable-inertia balance paired with a cylindrical hairspring and a COSC certificate. This latest version, the FB 3SPC.2-1, now gets a monochromatic rose gold treatment made to mark the opening of Art in Time Tokyo. It joins the white gold FB 3SPC.1 as a permanent, non-limited part of the collection.

The case is made out of 18k 5N rose gold, 42.3mm wide and just 9.3mm thick, which is impressive for a watch carrying this much mechanical ambition. The shape is rounder and more classical than earlier FB pieces, though the signatures remain: an oversized crown, and a porthole cut into the caseband at 9 o'clock. Look through it and you see the cylindrical hairspring doing its thing. Perfection.

Pretty much everything visible through the dial is movement, and it’s all nickel silver, sandblasted to a matte finish and ringed by a beige-varnished inner bezel. The effect is warm and slightly historical. Hours and minutes are indicated by faceted, skeletonised open-tipped hands in 18k gold with a blue CVD coating, a blue echoed on the seconds hand, the power-reserve indicator, and a scattering of screws.

The in-house calibre puts the regulating organ front and center on both sides of the watch. The cylindrical balance spring has two hand-formed terminal curves and sits with a bespoke collet and a variable-inertia balance, the combination that earns the chronometer certification. A large barrel under an arched bridge gives 72 hours of reserve. Flip it over and the back matches the front, nickel-silver bridges with hand-finished sandblasting and polished bevels.

The Chronomètre FB 3SPC.2-1 is a non-limited edition, priced a bit over CHF 150,000, and available now through Art in Time Tokyo and Ferdinand Berthoud. See more on the FB 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

• Three large portions of the Filchner Ice Shelf—dubbed A22, A23, and A24—calved into the Weddell Sea off of Antarctica in 1986. For National Geographic, Chris Heath documents the life and death of an iceberg called A23a, known at one time as the largest iceberg in the world. Born when it broke off A23 in 1991, it was “at least 44 nautical miles long, 40 nautical miles wide, and somewhere close to 2,000 square miles in area, or roughly the size of Bali.”

• Keeping exotic animals as pets is a global issue, and British Columbia’s latest attempt to address it shows how messy a fix can be. As of May 2026, it’s illegal to buy or sell exotic cats, such as servals, in the province; current owners can keep theirs, as long as they apply for a permit and give up the right to let visitors interact with the animals. The bigger problem, as Michelle Cyca reports, is what happens when owners want out: No one—not zoos, not the BC SPCA, not even Canada—is able to take a surrendered exotic cat. Cyca, who owns a savannah cat herself, asks a hard question: Just because we want to keep a wild animal, should we?

• Hua Hsu grew up in Cupertino when Apple was just another company in an anonymous office park—which is to say, before Highway 85 transformed the southern reaches of Silicon Valley. Now, he uses the artery’s arrival to chart the development of the region, his family, and himself. With the stories of so many highways being ones of displacement and inequality (see: New York, Chicago, Oakland), it’s a treat to read one that feels more like a memoir of possibility.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I am most certainly not a fan of Denis Villeneuve, nor have I ever really gotten into the whole Dune thing, but the first two movies blew me away. This looks like it will live up to that.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk