Monceau Goes Racing: Introducing the Model 01 GTS at Silverstone
There are worse places to launch a motorsport-inspired watch than Silverstone.
We were invited along by Monceau for the unveiling of its latest watch, the Model 01 GTS, but this wasn't going to be your typical watch launch. Instead, our day would involve getting hands-on with the new collection, spending time with Monceau owner Simon Ryan and heading behind the scenes with 18-year-old British racing driver Jude Peters as he prepared to compete in the British round of the Michelin Le Mans Cup.
With 46 cars preparing to take to the circuit, the weather beginning to turn and the unmistakable noise of a race paddock around us, the Model 01 GTS suddenly made a lot of sense.
But to understand this latest chapter for Monceau, we first need to rewind around 70 years.
Bringing Monceau Back to Life
Monceau isn't technically a new watch brand. Its story began in Lausanne, Switzerland, during the 1950s, originating from a family-owned watch and jewellery boutique before developing into a watchmaker in its own right.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Monceau produced a surprisingly broad selection of watches, including numerous chronographs, men's and women's pieces and watches in precious metals. Vintage examples still occasionally appear for sale today.
Then, sometime around the late 1970s, Monceau quietly disappeared.
Exactly what happened isn't entirely clear. Piecing together what remains of the company's history isn't particularly easy, although Simon believes the most likely explanation is one familiar to anyone interested in Swiss watchmaking history: the Quartz Crisis.
Monceau became one of the many names that simply vanished. Several decades later, Simon wasn't actually looking for a forgotten Swiss watch company to resurrect. He was looking for a watch.
Simon Ryan - Photo credit - Nick Perry Photography
Approaching his 50th birthday, he had begun searching for a birth-year piece when a late-night trawl through eBay turned up an attractive 1960s racing chronograph. The name printed on its dial was one he didn't recognise: Monceau.
That curiosity quickly became a rabbit hole.
Simon began searching for other examples and attempting to piece together the history of the company. At roughly the same time, after 25 years working in branding, he had already decided that he wanted to create his own watch brand.
Eventually the two ideas collided. Rather than invent another name and another history, why not breathe life back into a genuine piece of Swiss watchmaking history?
As Simon explained to us at Silverstone, the idea wasn't to recreate Monceau as it was in the 1960s. It was to imagine what the company might be making today had it never disappeared.
That's an important distinction.
There is no shortage of revived watch brands digging through their archives and recreating old models almost verbatim. Simon wanted Monceau's history to inform the new company rather than dictate it.
"If they'd carried on production, I doubt that they'd be making watches now that look the same as the ones they made 50 or 60 years ago," he told us.
Instead, the challenge is to move Monceau forward without completely abandoning what came before.
The Model 01
The first result of that approach arrived in 2025 with the Model 01.
An integrated-bracelet sports watch, its design actually contained a subtle connection to Monceau's past. Simon had discovered a late-1970s integrated-bracelet Monceau believed to have been produced for the Saudi Air Force. Elements of that watch's case architecture became part of the inspiration for the modern Model 01.
There were some very personal considerations involved too.
Simon has relatively small wrists and had often struggled with integrated-bracelet watches, which can wear considerably larger than their dimensions suggest. His answer was to make the Model 1 slim, comfortable and relatively restrained on the wrist.
That also influenced the decision to use a hand-wound Swiss mechanical movement.
It allowed the watch to remain thin, but there was another connection to Monceau's history. Many of the vintage pieces Simon had discovered from the 1950s and '60s were powered by manually wound movements.
And if you're going to revive an old Swiss watchmaker, Simon felt the watches themselves ought to remain Swiss made.
The Model 1 launched through Kickstarter and successfully reached its funding target. But Monceau's fortunes took a rather unexpected turn earlier this year.
Enter Russell Crowe.
The Hollywood actor got his hands on a Model 01 and subsequently posted a roughly ten-minute video about the watch and the brand to his TikTok account. The result was fairly dramatic.
Monceau's remaining Model 01 inventory quickly sold out. Even better for Simon, Crowe subsequently ordered another two watches himself.
The relationship continued and, just days before our meeting at Silverstone, Simon had travelled to the Venice Film Festival to personally deliver one of the first Model 01 GTS prototypes to him. Not bad going for a Swiss name that, only a few years ago, was largely forgotten.
Introducing the Monceau Model 01 GTS
The Model 01 GTS represents the next stage of that revival.
The underlying architecture remains familiar. It uses the same case and manually wound Swiss mechanical movement as the Model 1, but almost everything around them has been given a sportier character.
The polished aesthetic of the original makes way for a sandblasted case, while there's a completely new dial and handset. Buyers can choose between an integrated steel bracelet, also sandblasted to match the case, or an FKM rubber strap.
On the wrist, it transforms the character of the Model 1 considerably.
This feels much more like a tool watch.
More importantly, the GTS gives Simon the opportunity to indulge another of his passions: cars.
There are three versions, and rather than simply choosing three vaguely automotive colour combinations, Simon has gone considerably further. Each has been inspired by the paintwork and racing liveries of specific cars from the late 1960s and 1970s.
First is Verde Scandal, combining a black fumé dial with vivid green details.
The green takes its inspiration from Lamborghini's wonderfully extroverted Verde Scandal, a colour associated with the Miura and accompanied by one of those stories that seems almost too good not to repeat. According to the tale, a female customer wanted her Miura painted to match the lime-green dress she was wearing and promptly handed the dress to the salesman so Lamborghini could reproduce the colour.
Whatever the precise truth behind the legend, subtle it certainly isn't.
Next comes Irión Azur, pairing a blue fumé dial with orange accents.
Blue and orange immediately brings Gulf racing colours to mind, but Simon deliberately looked beyond the familiar powder-blue and orange livery.
The inspiration instead comes from the darker blue and orange combination associated with Grady Davis and the early Gulf racing programme. Davis, an executive at Gulf Oil, owned a Ford GT40 road car that was subsequently converted for competition, gaining an orange stripe over its dark-blue bodywork in the process.
It's a neat piece of motorsport history and, importantly, gives the GTS a colour combination that doesn't simply imitate the Gulf-inspired watches we've seen many times before.
Then there's Tobacco Targa.
This was the one that immediately caught our attention.
Its fumé brown dial moves through chocolate, bronze and tobacco tones depending on the light, taking inspiration from Porsche's Tobacco Metallic paint of the late 1970s.
Having now seen all three watches in person, Tobacco Targa would be our pick. On the sandblasted steel bracelet in particular, it looks superb.
Photographs will inevitably tell part of the story, but the way that brown dial changes character on the wrist is something that really needs to be seen in person.
From Sim Racing to Silverstone
The automotive connection doesn't end with some cleverly chosen dial colours.
Our trip to Silverstone also marked Monceau's partnership with young British racing driver Jude Peters.
And his story is arguably as interesting as the watches.
Peters had only recently turned 18 when we met him, yet was already competing in LMP3 machinery in the Michelin Le Mans Cup, a championship that visits circuits including Spa-Francorchamps, Barcelona and Le Mans. What makes his journey particularly unusual is that, only two years earlier, he hadn't raced a car. His experience was in sim racing.
The bedroom simulator has subsequently been replaced by an LMP3 prototype and grids packed with experienced racing drivers, some of whom have been competing for more than a decade.
Monceau began working with Peters several months ago, with Simon hoping the relationship will develop into a long-term partnership.
For us, it also meant unusually close access to the realities of endurance racing. We met Jude, his family and members of the team before being invited into the garage to see the car being prepared and experience the race from behind the scenes.
This wasn't standing in a hospitality suite watching cars disappear past the window every couple of minutes.
We were in the garage as the team worked, able to see what happens during the race and the preparation surrounding the driver changes.
Then came the start. Forty-six cars lined up at Silverstone, engines reverberating around the circuit as the weather began closing in.
You can watch motorsport on television every weekend, but standing alongside the start-finish straight as a field like that prepares to race is something else entirely.
Simon may have invited us to Silverstone to see a watch, but by this point he was doing a reasonably good job of converting us to endurance racing as well. With a podium finish of 3rd, from 15th after the driver swap, Jude and his team, did exceptionally well, and we were honoured to be there.
The Difficult Second Album
Simon described the Model 01 GTS as Monceau's "difficult second album", and it's probably a fair analogy.
The first Model 1 established what the revived Monceau could be. The GTS has the more difficult job of proving there is somewhere meaningful to take it.
From what we've seen, there is.
Rather than simply changing the dial colours and calling it a new collection, Simon has managed to give the existing architecture a distinctly different personality. The sandblasted finish, new handset, fumé dials and rubber strap option make the GTS feel considerably more purposeful than the original Model 1.
The automotive inspiration could easily have become a collection of motorsport clichés too. Instead, Simon has dug a little deeper, choosing stories and colours with genuine links to automotive history.
And pairing the launch with Jude Peters feels similarly appropriate.
There's something rather fitting about a revived watch brand still finding its feet backing an 18-year-old racing driver attempting to make his way through the endurance racing ranks.
Both are at the beginning of their respective journeys.
Availability
Pre-orders for the Monceau Model 1 GTS are scheduled to open on 22 September, with an initial production run limited to just 150 watches across the collection.
Delivery of the first watches is expected in January 2027.
At the time of our interview, final pricing hadn't been confirmed, although Simon expects the GTS to be around £749 on the FKM rubber strap and £849 on the steel bracelet. The FKM strap will also be available separately for those wanting both options.
The initial pre-order window is expected to remain open for approximately two weeks, unless all 150 pieces are allocated sooner.
A second production run may follow later in 2027.
For Monceau, though, the GTS feels more significant than simply adding another watch to the catalogue.
The Model 01 proved that Simon could breathe life back into a Swiss name that had disappeared more than four decades ago. The GTS begins answering the more interesting question: what does Monceau become next?
Simon isn't interested in spending the next decade remaking watches from the 1960s. He wants to create the watches Monceau might have made had the company never gone away.
After spending a day at Silverstone with the new Model 01 GTS on the wrist, we'd say the revived Monceau is beginning to find its own identity. And, for what it's worth, we'll take the Tobacco Targa.