IWC Schaffhausen Relaunch Ingenieur Collection

By Valerie Jack | January 21, 2013

Luxury watchmakers IWC Schaffhausen are taking pole position at this week’s Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie. Today in Geneva, Switzerland, the manufacture announced the relaunch of their classic Ingenieur watches.

The original Ingenieur, unveiled in 1955, was one of the first high-precision watches wound solely by the movement of the owner’s arms, utilizing a bidirectional automatic movement. IWC’s famed technical director Albert Pellaton conceived of winding mechanisms (calibres 852 and 8521) featuring an eccentrically shaped cam and a rocking bar with two pawls that transformed movement into a bidirectional to-and-fro movement.

This exceptionally efficient concept lives on in the new Ingenieur collection for 2013. During the announcement, IWC credited their partnership with the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One™ Team for putting this classic timepiece back in gear. The engineers at Mercedes are constantly improving and reinventing, inspiring IWC Schaffhausen to overhaul their classic design. The result is the Ingenieur Constant-Force Tourbillon with double moon display.

Once again a benchmark of efficiency, the regularity of the rate of this timepiece is a feat in precision engineering, thanks to a patented constant-force mechanism in a tourbillon. The Ingenieur Constant-Force Tourbillon also features a quick-action switch found in the Ingenieur Perpetual Calendar Digital Date-Month, which moves up to five display discs simultaneously.

The influence of the Merecedes’ Formula One™ cars which inspired this relaunch is felt throughout this watch. A titanium aluminide case echoes the materials used in their racecars, while the dial is made of carbon fibre. The rubber strap with its textile inlay is stitched either with yellow or red nylon thread, reminiscent of the stripes on the walls of soft and super-soft-slick tires. This limited-edition timepiece, which will retail for $26,400, will have a production run of only one hundred pieces for each the yellow and red nylon thread models.

Several famous faces dropped by IWC’s booth to check out the relaunch, including actors Kevin Spacey, Gerard Butler and Eric Dane, as well as models Karolina Kurkova and Adriana Lima. Check them out in our gallery below!