A new Bugatti hypercar means a new Jacob & Co. hyperwatch — and you just know that, in times like these, that is no overstatement. A few days after Bugatti introduced its Tourbillon supercar, the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Tourbillon is making its debut, leaving no new Bugatti owner’s wrists bare. Surely, once you have spent $4,100,000 on the car, you’ll find the spare change in the back of the sofa or something for a watch that costs a mere $340,000?
In keeping with past traditions, the latest Bugatti car watch also features a functioning automaton replica of the automobile’s engine. To the world’s great surprise, Bugatti replaced the “old” quad-turbo-charged W16 with a new, naturally aspirated V16 engine, meaning an excessively long block that had to be fitted to the car — and its matching timepiece. Jacob & Co. says its father-and-son, founder-and-CEO duo visited Bugatti in September 2022 and January 2023 to get an early preview of the Bugatti Tourbillon car to allow them to prepare to engineer the watch to go with the latest Bugatti car.
Jacob & Co. took on the challenge and built on the foundations it had established with its previous Bugatti Chiron watches — check out our hands-on look at this $1.5 Million example. The principle is this: The engine block is carved out from a block of transparent sapphire crystal, and 16 pistons are machined from tiny blocks of titanium, which are installed and driven by a single-axis crankshaft. Just as they are in the ICE (internal combustion engine) in the Bugatti hypercar.
The beautifully intricate crankshaft is visible through a long window along the center of the caseback.
As it is with the 1,000-horsepower, 8.3-liter, V16 engine in the Bugatti Tourbillon car, the “engine” inside the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Tourbillon watch has to be machined and assembled with extraordinary precision, otherwise the crankshaft and all its tiny undulations — its pins, pistons, webs, and mounting points — will fail to work. Jacob & Co. has even made sure that the “firing order” and, more importantly, their sequence is true to the car (although there are, of course, no explosions inside the Bugatti wristwatch). Four sets of four exhaust manifolds are also present, in a stunning, polished execution.
In ever-so-slightly more ordinary watchmaking news, the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Tourbillon watch features a tourbillon — of course, it does — that functions twice as fast as most tourbillons, completing a rotation around its axis every 30 seconds. It is also a flying tourbillon, meaning it is secured only from below, without an upper bridge obscuring the view. The 557-part movement has a power reserve of 48 hours, operates at 3Hz, and has enough go-juice to power 20 full animation sequences before it requires winding. There is even a power reserve indicator for this function via the smaller hand in the power reserve counter. The time is indicated by two retrograde hands, taking the car-themed displays even further.
On the wrist, the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Tourbillon watch seems a bit of an odd-looking thing. To its credit, despite its complexity and high component count, it remains a wearable size, especially by Jacob & Co. standards. The black PVD-coated titanium case measures 52mm by 44mm, with both straps being installed in a lug-free design. Overall thickness is 15mm, so not unlike a 7750-equipped chronograph — but with so much more on show. Over the years, Jacob & Co. has made admirable progress in packaging its highly complicated movements in increasingly more compact ways, thus improving wearability.
You can expect workmanship and quality of execution to be outstanding, too — which is as it should be for a watch that costs more than many luxury sports cars. To give you an example, the crown is styled to look like the control knobs inside the cabin of the Bugatti Tourbillon car — although, in a strange turn of events, could we say that the dashboard of the car is maybe even more spectacular in a “meshing wheels and hands chasing each other” sort of way? Who knows, maybe Jacob & Co. will introduce a sportier watch that pays homage to this fantastic dash.
Jacob & Co. certainly is leaving itself some extra room to play with: This blackened titanium piece is limited to 150 units — while the watch brand promises to create a watch to go with all the 250 cars to be made over the years. This is to say that we can expect some sapphire-clad, or colorful gem-set versions, likely to be priced many times over this one, in the future. Until then, one can dream about watching the tiny titanium pistons do their thing inside the sapphire engine block of this Bugatti car-inspired watch. The Jacob & Co. Bugatti Tourbillon watch is priced at $340,000 USD and is limited to 150 pieces. You can learn more at the Jacob & Co. website.
