As Lewis Hamilton plays out his last season as a Mercedes driver before joining Ferrari next year in style – at least on the pit lane – being an exemplary IWC ambassador will rate pretty highly on his long list of achievements. Indeed, in Monaco last weekend, he was flying the flag for the Swiss watchmakers again, rocking an as yet unreleased all luminous ceramic IWC Pilot's Watch Chronograph.
“Lewis has been very instrumental in understanding how we want to play this ambassador card,” IWC’s CEO Christoph Grainger-Herr tells GQ earlier in the year. “Now when I meet people and we start discussions, I'm looking for a connection [like’s Lewis’s] where over time, and this always needs to be built, we believe in what we're doing together."
Not much is known about this mysterious watch that appeared on Hamilton's wrist, but we do know that ceramic watches have long been a specialty of IWC. Back in the '80s, when Swatch was coming to prominence building inexpensive, plastic-cased timekeepers, Schaffhausen-based IWC was experimenting with black zirconium oxide cases. In 1994, the brand released the ref. 3705 “Fliegerchronograph,” which has since become a pilot’s watch classic. These days, IWC not only manufactures its own ceramic-cased watches, but even develops proprietary materials in-house at an advanced manufacture that opened in 2018.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Ceramic – scratch-proof, lightweight, and able to take on colour – is one thing, and manufacturing high-quality watches made from the material is still a relatively expensive, laborious process. But what if ceramic could be combined with a luminous material such that the entire watch would glow in the dark, and not just dial elements as on most conventional tool watches, or even the full dial as on some of IWC’s past creations? Now that would be an impressive feat, and would no doubt bring more potential customers into the ceramic watch fold.
Well, that’s exactly what IWC has done. The company’s experimental division, XPL, has developed a patented new material called Ceralume that mixes ceramic powders with Super-LumiNova pigments, resulting in ceramic watch cases that glow in the dark for more than 24 hours. (Unlike radioactive tritium, which has a half-life of roughly 12.3 years, SLN doesn’t severely degrade over time – however, it does need to be “charged” in light before it will glow in darkness.) In order to mix the two materials such that the resulting material is homogenous and devoid of irregularities, a special ball milling process was used in combination with more conventional sintering.
The first watch produced using this new material is a one-off concept piece – a Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 with a luminescent case, dial, and even a glowing white rubber strap, all of which have been infused with SLN. (The brass dial plate is spayed with it and then printed; the strap is injection moulded.) The result is a 10-year-old’s dream: a watch that fully glows in the dark like a ceiling covered in those stars that adorned every kid’s room in the ’80s and ’90s.
Again, unfortunately there’s just one of these to go around at the moment, and it would seem that you have to be a knighted, record-winning Formula 1 driver named Lewis Hamilton in order to rock one.
“Top athletes are often quite single-minded, their entire life has been about hitting a ball across a court or getting a ball into a hole or whatever it may be,” says Grainger-Herr. "But Lewis has always been somebody who's so much into aesthetics, into fashion, into design, into music, into sports, into a huge range of things. And luckily for us, he was able to do actual product design. Where we ping pong, he pushes us beyond the limit, we push him."
Tech like this new luminous ceramic beauty often begins as an expensive, experimental passion project before trickling down into more widespread, affordable fare. So here's hoping that in a few years all of us will get the chance to rock a glow-in-the-dark ceramic watch – and fulfil a long-dormant childhood dream in the process.
