When it comes to motorsport tie-ins, most watches are as subtle as a train wreck. There’s always some automaker’s logo clumsily stamped onto the dial or a cloying tagline engraved on the caseback. It’s all a bit too on the nose.
This story originally appeared in Volume 18 of Road & Track.
Even if the name gives it away, Autodromo’s Group C connects with racing as few watches do: with vibes. Evoking the top-tier Eighties prototypes that screamed down the Mulsanne straight at 250 mph, the Group C offers fans a less obvious take on the racing chronograph. No sponsor logos here.
Instead, splashes of color conjure images of Group C’s legends: the Sauber C9, the Silk Cut Jaguar XJR-9, and the all-conquering Porsche 962. Even the watch’s sculpted flanks hint at the smooth-top, flat-side aesthetic that made Group C cars indelible icons, shaped as they were by the era’s fresh understanding of ground effects.
With a digital display and a quartz movement, the Group C rails against the idea that racing chronographs need pricey automatic workings, tiny fussy hands, and a trio of illegible subdials.
It’s fitting. There’s a transportive element to a small digital display, harking back to when Michael Jackson ruled the airwaves and shiny gold calculator watches—Casios, G-Shocks, and Seikos—wreathed every wrist. The computer entered our homes then, not as an algorithm hell-bent on putting us in line but as a device that might open the world.
The computer upended racing then too. In the decade when Group C burned brightest, the cars transformed from conventional tube-frame racers to low-slung composite-bodied spacecraft on wheels, their lines dreamed up using electrons and silicon, ones and zeros.
Under the Group C’s funky paint colors, a 42-mm stainless-steel case—no carbon composite here—makes the watch far hardier than any childhood toy timepiece. The digital display shows the time, day, date, and, of course, that all-important chronograph with a mode to show lap splits. You know, racing-watch stuff.
To top it off, Autodromo ships the Group C in a box shaped like the era’s iconic turbofan wheel. A silly riff on expectations? Yep, but when it comes to a quirky watch that celebrates the racing chronograph format with spirit and subtlety, we’re here for it.
The only member of staff to flip a grain truck on its roof, Kyle Kinard is R&T's senior editor and resident malcontent. He lives near Seattle and enjoys the rain. His column, Kinardi Line, runs when it runs.
