While Lewis Hamilton is set to move away from Mercedes next year and as such his connection to IWC will be coming to an end, he’s still the Schaffhausen brand’s most prominent ambassador at the moment. This past weekend, at the F1 Monaco Grand Prix, he was spotted wearing a brand new IWC wristwatch, the Ceralume Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 Concept Watch. It’s their first ever fully luminous ceramic watch.
Ceralume is a new proprietary material created by IWC that combines the tough, scratch resistant and lightweight properties of ceramic with the light emitting property of Super-LumiNova. In order to achieve this, they combined ceramic powders and Super-LumiNova pigments in a patent-pending manufacturing process. This is possible because Super-LumiNova, manufactured by RC Tritec, is itself a ceramic compound.
The resulting timepiece is a sleek and cool white Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 that glows with a vibrant blue light in low light conditions. There have been several developments in luminescent materials recently, as back at the tail end of last year Bell & Ross released the BR X5 Green Lum, which also introduced a new luminescent case material in the form of LM3D. Although it’s IWC’s history with ceramic that makes Ceralume an intriguing development.
As the IWC Ceralume is a concept watch, the case material is the main focus here so the dimensions (41mm) and the movement (presumably but not confirmed to be the 69385 Calibre) aren’t really that important. The only question is how long until we see a mainline IWC made from Ceralume? I would wager that it won’t be that long in the grand scheme of things given the online interest in the timepiece as well as the cultural significance of it being one of the last IWCs likely to be spotted on Hamilton’s wrist before he big change.
More details at IWC.
