HEUER Monaco "McQueen" LeMans 1970s

The Heuer Monaco is the watch that broke the rules of its own category. Presented on 3 March 1969, it arrived as one of the world's first automatic chronographs and, at the same moment, as the first square chronograph case ever made water-resistant. Nothing about it was conventional, and more than half a century later nothing about it has been softened. Reference 1133B remains the most recognizable shape in twentieth-century motorsport watchmaking.

The case is stainless steel, measuring 40mm across excluding the crown and 45.5mm from lug to lug, formed as a single square block with brushed flanks and a stepped, almost architectural profile. It was developed by the case maker Piquerez, who solved the problem of sealing a square case and granted Heuer exclusive rights to use it for chronographs. The crown sits on the left at 9 o'clock, opposite the two chronograph pushers—a deliberate declaration that the watch wound itself and that the crown was no longer the centre of the design.

The dial is a deep matte blue carrying two contrasting black square registers: running seconds at 9 and a thirty-minute counter at 3, with the date framed at 6. Applied steel markers are set against red accents around the minute track, and the central chronograph hand is finished in bright red—the detail that makes the Monaco legible at a glance, on film and on the wrist. The hands have taken on a warm, uneven patina, and the case carries the light marks of a watch that has been worn rather than stored.

Powering the watch is the automatic chronograph movement developed under the joint venture known as Project 99, in which Heuer-Leonidas, Breitling, Büren and Dubois Dépraz each contributed part of the whole: a Büren micro-rotor automatic base with the Dubois Dépraz chronograph module mounted on the dial side. That architecture is the reason the crown moved to the left, and the reason the Monaco looks the way it does.

Completing the watch is a stainless steel bracelet, carefully matched to the brushed case and to the period the watch comes from. The lug width is 22mm, so leather or a racing strap can be fitted in its place without difficulty.

HISTORY — Le Mans, Steve McQueen and Jo Siffert

In 1970 Steve McQueen went to Le Mans to make a racing film with a documentary's appetite for realism and very little script to hold it together. His character, Michael Delaney, was built on the image of the Swiss Formula One driver Jo Siffert, who had signed with Heuer in 1968 and whose white, Heuer-branded racing overalls McQueen wore on screen. Once the overalls were settled, the watch on the wrist had to match them.

The film's property master, Don Nunley, turned to Heuer for chronographs, and the choice fell on the Monaco in part because the newly launched reference could be supplied in triplicate for filming. The blue 1133B reached cinemas in 1971 and has been tied to McQueen ever since—not as a sponsorship, but as a costume decision made to solve a continuity problem.

The reference stayed in production until 1975, and it is generally held that fewer than five thousand blue-dial 1133B examples left the factory. The caseback of each one is engraved Tool No. 033, the number of the proprietary tool required to open the Piquerez case—a small piece of workshop bureaucracy that has become one of the first things a collector looks for.

- wrist size in our picture is 17cm circumference -