What do you get if you cross the personalisation and attention to detail of a couture fashion house, the precision of Swiss watchmaking and the opulence of the world’s most luxurious car marque?
The answer is a timepiece created by Vacheron Constantin for the dashboard of a one-off custom Rolls Royce Droptail made by its Coachbuild operation.
An unnamed client with passion for both horology and luxury motoring commissioned the timepiece for the dashboard of his Roller.
Vacheron Constantin developed a single-edition Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon to complement the car’s wood veneer dashboard.
It also had to be removable so the owner could admire it at home.
“The two centuries-old brands share a quest for perfection that consists of constantly pushing the limits of feasibility”, says Christian Selmoni, Vacheron Constantin’s director of style and heritage. “This philosophy is an excellent catalyst for innovation and good taste, both technically and aesthetically.”
Vacheron Constantin and the owner agreed on a hand-wound calibre 1990, an adaptation of a movement used in 2015 for the maison’s most complicated timepiece, the Reference 57260 pocket watch.
It has a bi-retrograde display with instantaneous return of the hours and minutes that is reminiscent of traditional motor car speedometers, although its titanium hands return to zero in the blink of an eye.
Four patents have been filed for the technical innovations featured in the calibre 1990.
First, there is the instantaneous retrograde system, controlled by a single minutes cam that perfectly synchronizes the jump of the two hands at midnight or noon.
The patented escapement collet – a component securing the inner end of the balance-spring – is made of titanium. The fact that this material matches that of the regulating organ results in improved regulator performance.
Third is a patent for the architecture of the tourbillon carriages, which rotate every 15 seconds to form a Maltese cross motif, the Vacheron Constantin emblem.
A final patent relates the diamond-coated silicon pallet-lever, which offers greater resistance to wear and an optimized friction coefficient.
