Paul Newman’s Big Red Daytona.

WSJ:

On December 12, Phillips will hold a live online auction featuring two iconic watches: a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona that actor and race-car driver Paul Newman was given by his wife and actor, Joanne Woodward, as well as a Heuer Monaco, one of six identical watches worn by actor Steve McQueen while filming the classic racing film Le Mans. The auction spotlights the importance of celebrity backstories to big sales. Read the rest of this entry »

Watch collectors are clearly quite mad. I have a Rolex myself. Years ago, I ran into people in business who wore expensive watches and who checked out your wrist as a form of credentialing. If you didn’t wear a status watch, they figured you never made enough real money to blow some on a watch. I also got tired of lesser watches breaking and batteries wearing out, so I said: “By gosh, I’ll buy a Rolex, a permanent watch!” What I didn’t know is that every 5-6 years, you’ve got to send that Rolex somewhere to be cleaned and serviced. If you send it to Rolex proper, they’ll nail you about a thousand. I use other watch services.

Younger people often don’t even wear watches. If they need the time, they just look on their phone.

Personally, I kind of enjoy reading about ridiculously expensive watches. I do collect lots of stuff, and here’s an area of recherché expensive collecting that I can read up on, completely immune to any temptation to participate and collect.

And that Paul Newman Oyster Cosmograph, $500,000-$700,000 and it isn’t even self-winding!

Artnet:

Observers knew that Paul Newman’s Rolex watch, estimated to sell for around $1 million, would be the highlight of Phillips’s first ever New York watch auction yesterday. But no one expected the hand-crafted Daytona watch—which the late actor wore in movies, magazine shoots, and at parties—to sell for $17.8 million, going to an unidentified buyer after 12 minutes of heated bidding.

The sale smashed the previous record for a watch, $11.1 million for a stainless steel Patek Philippe, which sold at Phillips last November.

The “Paul Newman” has won legendary status in the watch community, both because it is considered to be one of the most coveted timepieces in the world—the New York Times compared it to the Mona Lisa for the watch collecting world—and because, until the sale’s announcement in August, few people outside of the Newman family knew where it was. It was first given to Newman by his wife, actress Joanne Woodward, who inscribed it with the message “DRIVE CAREFULLY ME.”

RTWT