James Bond Wore a Breitling Once. Breitling Never Got Over It.

In the 1965 film Thunderball, Sean Connery's James Bond drives an Aston Martin DB5 and wears a Breitling Top Time. One of those two facts became legend. The DB5 turned into the most famous movie car ever made, so tied to Bond that Aston Martin still sells special editions off the back of it sixty years later. The watch got one film. In the next installments Bond wore Rolex, then Seiko, and today he wears Omega through a product placement deal that's lasted three decades.

 

This month Breitling decided to reclaim its small piece of that story. The new Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 is a tribute to the DB5 itself, launched in three limited versions, and it lands right after Breitling signed on as a sponsor of Aston Martin's Formula 1 team. Nothing about the timing is an accident.

 

Source: Hodinkee.com

Before I get to the new watches, the old one deserves its moment, because the Thunderball Breitling has one of the best backstories in all of watch collecting. The actual prop watch from the film was a Top Time modified by the movie's prop department into a geiger counter, which Bond uses to hunt stolen nuclear bombs. After filming, it disappeared for decades. Then in 2013 a man in England bought a beat-up old watch at a car boot sale for about 25 pounds. It turned out to be the screen-worn Bond Breitling, and it sold at Christie's later that year for more than 100,000 pounds. Somewhere out there, a seller is still not over it.

The Top Time Itself

The Top Time was Breitling's odd duck from the start. Launched in 1964, it wore a rounded square case, what collectors call a cushion case, at a time when serious chronographs were round and sober. It was aimed at young buyers, priced below the brand's pilot watches, and it looked like the 1960s in the best way. Modern Breitling revived the line a few years ago as its vintage-flavored playground, and last year's 38mm Racing editions, at around $7,700, were some of the most liked watches the brand has made in a decade.

The new DB5 tribute grows to 41mm across, 47.9mm lug to lug, and 13.8mm thick. That's a real jump from the 38mm sweet spot, and I'll come back to it.

Source: Hodinkee.com

The dial carries the detail this whole release hangs on: a ring of real wood inlay around the edge, meant to echo the wooden steering wheel and cabin trim of the 1963 DB5. Wood on a dial is rare because it's a pain to cut and stabilize at that scale, and here it actually earns its place instead of being a gimmick. The DB5 name sits printed on the wood at the top right.

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Inside runs Breitling's own B01 movement, the same one from the Navitimer and Chronomat. Column wheel, vertical clutch, chronometer certificate, 70 hours of reserve. No date window anywhere, and good. A chronograph dial with a date hole punched in it always looks like a suit with a name tag.

Water resistance is 100 meters, which surprised me given the vintage-style mushroom pushers and a crown that doesn't screw down. Breitling did it with two crown gaskets. You still shouldn't swim with the wood-trimmed Bond tribute, but you could.

Three Versions, Three Prices

The steel version has a silver sunray dial with black counters, runs 1,002 pieces, and costs $11,400. Breitling says it's the closest of the three to the reference 2002 that Connery wore on screen. This is the one that makes sense, and honestly the one I'd buy, because the story lives in the silver-and-black look, not in the materials.

The middle child pairs a steel case with a platinum bezel and a black lacquer dial. 315 pieces, $18,600. A platinum bezel on a steel watch is an unusual flex, invisible to everyone but the owner, which is either pointless or the whole point depending on your personality.

Source: Hodinkee.com

At the top sits the red gold version, 250 pieces, $41,500, with a hand-cut black onyx dial, the first time Breitling has ever used onyx. Gold case, gold hands, gold subdial rings, gold rotor. It's a beautiful thing in photos, and it's also priced against a gold Daytona and not far from some Patek chronograph territory, where the Breitling name, fairly or not, doesn't carry the same weight on the resale market. Buy it for love, not for the ledger.

Cars and Watches, Again

Watch brands can't stay away from car deals. Rolex has the Daytona, named after a racetrack. TAG Heuer built its whole identity on Monaco and motorsport. Richard Mille sits on McLaren, IWC on Mercedes-AMG. A mechanical watch and a combustion engine are the same romance at two different sizes, hundreds of small parts working in a case, and people who fall for one tend to fall for the other. I see it in my own customers constantly. The watch conversation and the car conversation are usually the same conversation wearing different clothes.

 

What Breitling is doing here is a smarter version of the usual formula, though. Most car-partnership watches slap a logo on a dial and call it a collab. This one ties into a sixty-year-old piece of film history the brand actually owns, backed by a fresh F1 sponsorship to keep Aston Martin in the headlines. If the partnership runs for years, this first DB5 series is the reference future editions get compared to, and first editions of a running series have a habit of aging well with collectors.

Source: Hodinkee.com

My honest reservations, since I tend to have some. The move from 38mm to 41mm chases a bigger commercial audience and gives up some of the vintage charm that made the Racing series special, and at 13.8mm thick this is not a slim watch under a shirt cuff. The pricing has also climbed fast, with the entry steel model costing nearly half again what the 38mm cost last year. Breitling is clearly testing how far up it can push, and limited numbers plus Bond plus Aston Martin is a strong ladder to climb on.

Still, I keep coming back to that wood ring and the silver dial, and I suspect the 1,002 steel pieces will be gone quickly.