Giorgio Piola: Motorsport Watches From the Mind of an F1 Racecar Artist

In the modern era, the relationship between motor racing and timekeeping has gotten even more intimate, with watches developed in close collaboration with car manufacturers becoming more common: Hublot's partnership with Ferrari springs to mind, as does Roger Dubuis's team-up with Lamborghini, to name just a few Giorgio Piola Timepieces, a new watch brand based in Miami, offers a new take on a racing-style watch, not from a car designer but from a fine-art illustrator who has spent 40 years capturing in his meticulous draftsmanship the high-octane essence of Formula One automobiles and their engines "Illustrating Speed" is Giorgio Piola's stock-in-trade, and the Italian artisan brings those sensibilities to the line of watches that bears his name, all of which feature a design aesthetic that is unmistakably motor-racing-derived and also, most would find, distinctively Italian.

Protected underneath a non-reflective, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal, the dials have a colorful if somewhat busy tricompax design, with red, white and yellow highlights and a round red-rimmed date window at 4:30; the subdials' design is evocative of F1 steering wheels Surrounding the dial is a tachymeter scale flange, a staple of auto-racing-influenced watches and one perfectly at home on this one The Strat-3 collection - available in black, blue, green, yellow and red colorways, retails for $500.

The star of the Giorgio Piola Timepiece collection is the G-5 Automatic Chronograph, equipped with the ubiquitous but tried-and-true ETA 7750 integrated chronograph caliber, with automatic winding, a 28,800-vph frequency, and an approximately 44-hour power reserve The caseback, presumably also titanium, has a sapphire window - relatively small in comparison to the massive case diameter - that reveals the ETA 7750 movement, which has been enhanced with a Giorgio Piola-branded, eye-catching red rotor. . Source