A V8 Twin Turbo, an IWC Big Pilot's Watch and the Como lake

15 November 2018 | IWC , When Watches meet Cars

Do you think a man loves cars or watches more? The answer is almost obvious, he loves both, and he also puts them on the same level for opportunistic reasons, since they are not antithetical but complementary objects.

We should not be surprised if the marketing and communication managers of a car brand and of a watch brand are the professionals, although belonging to different businesses, who meet more often nowadays, and that the collaborations between the two sectors continue to flourish.

AMG Mercedes, champion of pilots and manufacturers for the fifth consecutive time. IWC Schaffhausen's vision.

What the team led by Toto Wolff has accomplished this year is an exceptional achievement, and represents a cycle that, in the last twenty years of Formula 1, has succeeded only around Maranello, with the difference that the one opened by the German team and its top driver seems destined to continue.

The team principal of the five-time world champion team in the world championship of drivers and manufacturers, who wears a Big Pilot's Watch Perpetual Calendar Top Gun, has recovered a gap, psychological and technical, that seemed unbridgeable towards Ferrari.

He succeeded through an effective and rapid change of his organization in the middle of the season, and thanks to the talent of Lewis Hamilton, currently the stronger and more mature driver of the circus. Toto has succeeded in the challenge of transforming an evident disadvantage in an advantage, celebrating last weekend, at the end of the Brazilian Grand Prix, the achievement of the fifth world championship title among manufacturers.

IWC has tied itself to the Stuttgart brand shortly before the beginning of its winning cycle, showing an incredible timing, which proves how it was not only the partnership of two souls that was up for grabs, but also the willingness to invest in a winning and long-term project.

Speaking in terms of watches, initially the partnership focused on a well-defined collection, last generation's Ingenieur; with time, it extended to more collections within the brand and, although not officially, pilots and their teams today wear watches from the Pilot's Watches collection.

Lewis and Valtteri usally wear a Big Pilot's Watch and a Pilot's Chrono respectively, and are the ambassadors of a collection that no longer lives exclusively on the legacy of Antoine De-Saint Exupéry or the fascination of Miramar's Fighter Weapons School, but has been promoted to the standard-bearer of competitions. Not surprisingly, the shape of a Pilot's Watch is shown on the racing gloves of the two pilots.

AMG Mercedes, a collection of cars that has just the appearance of a standard Mercedes. The C63S Convertible.

AMG, a brand once dedicated to the preparation of the Stuttgart cars, created by Hans Werner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher, has been a division owned by Daimler-Benz since the 1^st of January 2005, and it oversees all Mercedes' sports activities, as well as the manufacturing of high-performance cars, based on the current range of automobiles.

They constantly beat all the Nurbürgring category records; the last one dates from a few weeks ago, marked by the Mercedes-AMG 4-door GT-Coupé, which holds the title of fastest four-door sedan in the world (it has beaten the Giulia Quadrifoglio).

A leader on the track and among high-performance sports cars, Mercedes-AMG has carved out its space, and nowadays boasts the widest range on the market, which opens with the very recent AMG A35 (which will be followed by the A45), and even achieves the preparation of pure off-road vehicles such as the G-Class.

The Mercedes-AMG C63S Convertible is a mid-range car, and is the most powerful C-Class convertible, equipped with a V8 of over 500hp, fitted out with stratospheric torque and sophisticated electronics. The trademark of the partnership with IWC is in the front row, on the central console, where the designers of Affalterbach have inserted an analogical clock which recalls an IWC Ingenieur Mission Earth, with a smoothly colored silver cover that celebrates the car body of the historic Silver Arrows.

The Big Pilot's Watch: Junkers' cockpits are no longer enough

IWC Schaffhausen's Big Pilot's Watch is not an absolute novelty, but to see it associated with such an experience, for those who do not walk in the circus every day, feels strange.

Although the presentation of the Big Pilot's Heritage Watch has shifted attention towards the more plausible heir to the original T.S.C., once worn by pilots, the Big Pilot's Watch reborn ten years ago with the reference 5002 (nicknamed "Low Beat" and loved by collectors) is IWC Schaffhausen's aviator watch by definition, a pillar of the brand image, together with the Portugieser.

The new collection, updated in 2016, in addition to reorganizing the various models of the collection, has brought a series of technical and aesthetic improvements on which the team led by Christian Knoop focused, to make it even more balanced and refined. If the partnership with Mercedes-AMG has therefore increased the authority of IWC Schaffhausen, the fruitful collaboration with Santoni provided the Big Pilot's Watch with a touch of Italian luxury, which it lacked.

It now boasts one of the most beautiful leather straps around, because it does not come from any random supplier, and is not as cold as in previous versions, but it is made by a brand that takes care of the choice, treatment and coloring of the skin, just as it would on one of its own pairs of lace-ups, and its beauty is proved by the charm with which it ages naturally.

It will go under a shirt's cuff with difficulty, but one does not buy a Big Pilot's Watch for that, yet its 46mm in diameter for 15.6mm thickness, are the most balanced millimeter ever seen on a large aviator watch. The new dial has reached perfection, to which contributed the Arabic number 9, finally gone back to its place, as well as the luminous triangle at 12 hours, positioned under the minutes' scale.

From Cernobbio to Laglio: 8.1 km of “kick-down” and open skyes

The Mercedes-AMG C63s Convertible has four different configurations, which are selected through a small lever on the central console, and they operate in different ways the response of the engine, of the steering wheel, the suspensions and the intervention of electronic safety controls; these are completely disabled if you choose the Race position, which requires a wide track and pilot's skills, to be fully made use of.

The Sport+ option is probably the best compromise for those looking for the best possible performance, without exaggerating. In this configuration, the response of the V8 is rapid enough and, with each gearshift by means of the paddles placed behind the steering wheel, the electronics blips the throttle at each downshift, thus giving a pleasant rattle of the exhaust.

The eight kilometers from Cernobbio to Laglio, in the open air, become therefore lots of fun even if made at low speed, to respect the limits and characteristics of the road, narrow and two-way.

This is the way to best enjoy the drive along the Como Lake, which starts from the village that is wide known for the Concorso di Eleganza Villa d'Este, and ends in the last of the elegant towns of this route, before going back up the main road and returning to Milan.