Introducing The Breitling Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 Tribute To Aston Martin DB5, With Live Photos
The Breitling Top Time and the Aston Martin DB5 are back together after sixty years.
The Aston Martin DB5 has appeared in a grand total of eight James Bond films since it was first used by 007 in 1965 – in Thunderball, where it became Q Branch’s favorite vehicle for exotic automotive upgrades. Thunderball was also the one and only James Bond film in which a Breitling watch was featured, but it’s well known among Bond aficionados – the watch was a Top Time which in the film was modified to act as a Geiger counter, and the actual prop watch turned up at auction at Christie’s in 2013, where it sold for GBP 103,875.
James Bond, in the 1953 book Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming, starts out with a 1933 supercharged Bentley, and there is a brief appearance by a 1935 Bentley 3½ litre drophead coupé, in From Russia With Love, where it’s equipped with a car phone (which would have been a most exotic add-on in 1963, when the film came out), but for the films, a more modern, more overtly sexy car with as impeccable credentials as a piece of British engineering as the Bentley was wanted; hence the Aston Martin DB5.
Bond as originally written was contemptuous of contemporary American large displacement automobiles; at one point, in the 1955 Diamonds Are Forever, he says to the CIA agent Felix Leiter, of Leiter’s “Studillac” (which is a Studebaker with a V8 Cadillac engine), “This sort of hotrod job’s all right for kids who can’t afford a real car.”
Although Thunderball was the first and also last instance of a Breitling watch being used in a James Bond movie, it’s still one of the best known Bond watches and the first Bond watch modified by Q Branch as well. Today, Breitling has announced three new limited edition Top Time chronographs in partnership with Aston Martin, and specifically, in commemoration of the 1965 pairing of the DB5 with the first Bond gadget watch.
The three launch models are available in steel, with a silver dial; steel and platinum with a black lacquer dial, and 18k red gold, with an onyx dial. For this article, we shot a prototype model in steel and platinum, which made a very positive impression right out of the box.
The Breitling Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 Tribute To Aston Martin DB5 has the difficult task of commemorating probably the most famous Bond car without overdoing it, or resorting to automotive-adjacent design clichés, which is the single biggest problem with designing an automotive partnership watch. Breitling has kept things suitably subtle, and although the Top Time and DB5 show up together in a Bond movie, it looks like a watch that the literary Bond might have liked as well – quietly rich in detail, but not flashy. The most immediately obvious link to the car, is the wooden rehaut ring, which is present in all three models and carries a tachymeter bezel calibrated in units per hour.
Despite the pop culture origins of the relationship between Breitling’s Top Time watches and the DB5, this is a very dignified watch. The wooden rehaut, cushion case, and pump-style pushers all locate the watch in roughly the same era as the car – the DB5 was launched in 1963 and at that time, the watch world was starting to change rapidly as the Accutron tuning fork watch had been launched just three years earlier. (Surprisingly, the Accutron, with its space age feel, never appeared in a Bond film.) The generous dial size of the Tribute to Aston Martin watch also contributes to a sense of connection with the car, giving it a dashboard-instrument feel.
This is the second watch in the new partnership announced this year between Aston Martin and Breitling – the first, from earlier this year, is the Navitimer B01 Chronograph 43 Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 team, in titanium (Breitling is the official watch partner of the team).
A watch launched in commemoration of the relationship between Breitling and Aston Martin naturally arouses curiosity about whether or not a Breitling might feature in the next Bond movie. We don’t know much about James Bond 26 except that it’s happening, and that Denis Villeneuve will be directing, and that supposedly the as-yet-unnamed film, which is a full reboot with an as-yet-unnamed new Bond, will be, as writer Steven Knight has hinted, a darker take on the character than Daniel Craig’s Bond. (It is hard to imagine anything darker than Bond beating an opponent half to death in a men’s room during a cricket match in Pakistan, and then drowning him in a sink, but never say never; Villeneuve after all gave us some of the most unsparingly brutal gun battles in modern movies, in Sicario).
All that aside, the real acid test for any automotive collaboration wristwatch is how well the watch stands on its own. By this standard I think the Tribute To DB5 is a very successful watch. Certainly if you’re a Bond fan, or an Aston Martin fan, or both, it’s a great watch for tying the two together, but even if it didn’t say Aston Martin on the rehaut, it would still be a watch with a lot of laudably restrained depth to its design, and plenty of character to set it apart from other modern chronographs, and from Breitling’s other chronographs as well.
The Breitling Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 Tribute To Aston Martin: available in 18k gold, steel, or steel and platinum. All cases 41mm x 13.80mm, with sapphire crystals front and back, double gasket non-screw down crown; water resistance 100 meters. All watches on calfskin leather straps. Movement, Breitling in-house chronograph caliber B01, 30mm x 7.2mm, automatic with 70 hour power reserve, running at 28,800 vph; column wheel with vertical clutch; certified as a chronometer by the COSC.
Limited editions: in steel, 1,022 pieces; $11,400; in steel and platinum, 315 pieces; $18,600; in 18k red gold with natural onyx dial, 350 pieces; $41,500.
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