Racing Chronograph — White Ceramic, Orange Bezel

A painted case survives a season. The first knock takes a lug corner back to bare metal, and from there the grey creeps along every bevel until the watch looks like it is peeling. That is why white watches are rare and why most of them are quietly returned.

This one is ceramic. The case is stripped to individual parts, coated, and fired until the layer is harder than the metal beneath it, so the white sits in the surface rather than on top of it. The edges stay white. So does the caseback, the crown guards and the inside of every lug.

The second thing the process buys you is weight, or the absence of it. On the scale, strap fitted, the whole watch reads 55 grams — roughly half a steel chronograph the same size.

The bezel is solid orange with the tachymeter scale cut through it in black — the racing scale that turns a measured distance into a speed. It is the loudest thing on the watch and it sits furthest out, where it frames everything else.

Inside it the minute ring changes colour halfway round: green down the left side, red down the right, so the dial never reads the same on both sides. The counters at three and nine are silver-ringed with deep blue-violet centres, and the central chronograph hand is yellow, which is how you find it instantly against a white face.

Then the counter at six, which is not a counter at all in the usual sense. The dial is cut away and a yellow toothed wheel turns in the opening, in plain view, for as long as the watch is running.