The Brooklands Watch Company Chronograph that can instantly display your average lap speed

We’ve championed the efforts of the Brooklands Watch Company in previous issues but it remains a niche, low-volume maker among the many micro brands to have sprung up in the UK during the past decade. For those who have yet to discover BWC, it was founded in 2018 by aviator and saloon car racer Simon Jeffs following a visit to the celebrated Brooklands Museum.

It was at Brooklands that Jeffs initially encountered the Holden Apparatus, the world’s first chronograph specifically designed for verifying official speed records.

It inspired Jeffs to develop a wrist-worn chronograph that paid tribute to the golden era of Brooklands, and he commissioned none other than the celebrated designer Sir Terence Conran to pen it.

It proved to be one of Sir Terence’s last projects prior to his death in 2020 and now, four years later, the available run of 500 Brooklands Watch Company Triple-Four chronographs, priced at £5754, is all but sold out. Each was supplied in a handcrafted leather-bound trunk and included a specially designed Triple-Four badge based on a 1935 Brooklands emblem.

During the past year, however, Jeffs has been developing a more affordable variation of the watch which will feature the same movement and case as the Triple-Four but will be offered as an unlimited model that he predicts will have a “sub-£3000” price tag.

While the original watch was available only with a white dial, the new model will be offered in a choice of five colours – green, blue, black, salmon and ‘green panda’ (i.e. green with contrasting sub-dials).

Still in development, meanwhile, is another intriguing Brooklands Watch Company chronograph model – the P1 Racing Bezel. Designed, registered and patented, the bezel has been built to enable an instant calculation of the average lap speed of a car at any one of a given selection of motor racing circuits.

The key to the design are the ‘racing bezels’, a selection of interchangeable units that are each bespoke to specific circuits around the world, like Suzuka for example, above, and which will give an accurate reading when paired with any chronograph featuring a central 60-seconds hand. It’s an interesting concept and one that Jeffs hopes might be picked up by some of the bigger manufacturers.

He might be encouraged by the fact that around a decade ago the creator of a similarly small brand, Vogard, sold his patented Timezoner mechanism to the giant Richemont Group in Switzerland.

Its special feature was a bezel marked with different locations that, when turned, automatically reset the watch to the correct time at any given place.

The simple but ingenious system allowed for multiple variations – one of the best of which was the F1 Racing Edition in which the Timezoner bezel was engraved with the names of all of the world’s grand prix circuits.

Brooklands Watch Company Triple-Four, £5754. brooklandswatches.com