Heuer Monaco, the Square Chronograph Steve McQueen Made Famous

On March 3, 1969, Heuer, Breitling and Hamilton held press conferences in Geneva and New York on the same day to show the world something the Swiss had never sold before, an automatic chronograph. Heuer brought three watches. Two were familiar names. The third was a square slab of steel with a metallic blue dial and red accents, and its crown sat on the wrong side.

That third watch was the Monaco, named for the Grand Prix that runs through the streets of Monte Carlo. It would not survive the decade. Then a film released in 1971 put it on the wrist of the coolest man in Hollywood, and it never went away again.

Three rivals, one movement

The engine was the Calibre 11, which the three brands sold under the name Chronomatic. No single company built it. Büren, the movement maker that Hamilton bought during the project, supplied the automatic base with its small micro-rotor, an idea Büren had pioneered back in 1957. Dubois Dépraz, a specialist in the Vallée de Joux, built the chronograph module that sat on top and handled final assembly. Heuer, Breitling and Hamilton put the result in their own cases.

Calibre 11 watches wear their winding crown at nine o'clock, on the left of the case, with the chronograph pushers on the right. Heuer did not hide this. It made the odd crown part of the look.

Heuer put the new movement in the Carrera and the Autavia. The third model was the gamble. Jack Heuer, the great-grandson of founder Edouard Heuer and the man who had designed the Carrera in 1963, released what Phillips calls one of the most avant-garde chronographs of its time. Timing was not on anyone's side. Phillips notes that the Calibre 11 arrived in the same year Seiko released its first quartz movements, the opening shot of the shakeout covered in our history of Swatch and the quartz crisis.

The square that held water

Square watches were nothing new. Cartier had made one for an aviator in 1904, as our Cartier Santos history tells it. The problem was water. Keeping it out of a square case was widely thought to be impossible.

Heuer found a case maker who had solved it. Phillips credits EPSA, the Swiss firm that developed the compression case, and the watch site Webchronos describes how the case maker Piquerez pitched a square water-resistant case to Jack Heuer, who signed an exclusive contract right away. The result, the reference 1133, is described on Wikipedia's Monaco entry as the first square-cased and water-resistant chronograph. A domed crystal and that metallic blue dial gave it a look that seemed to come from a later decade.

Its first run was short. Wikipedia records that it was phased out by the mid-1970s.

A borrowed suit at Le Mans

Before it disappeared, the Monaco got its break. Between June and November 1970, the production of Le Mans filmed on location at the circuit, including during the real 24-hour race that June. McQueen played Michael Delaney, driver of the blue and orange number 20 Gulf Porsche 917K, and he did his own driving.

His adviser was Jo Siffert, the Swiss driver who was one of Heuer's first ambassadors. According to TAG Heuer's own magazine, McQueen studied the top drivers of the day and settled on Siffert's racing suit, which carried the Gulf colors and an embroidered Chronograph Heuer crest. With a Heuer logo already on the suit, McQueen picked a Heuer for his wrist, and he chose the Monaco for its design.

Six Monacos were used in the production. On the last day of filming McQueen gave one to his chief mechanic, Haig Altounian, as thanks for keeping him alive through months of high-speed work. The caseback carried an engraved dedication to Haig from Le Mans 1970, and Altounian kept it in a safety deposit box for close to half a century. Phillips auctioned one of the six film watches on December 12, 2020. One footnote for collectors is that the film watches ran the Calibre 12, the updated version of the original movement.

Le Mans opened on June 23, 1971. It fixed the image of McQueen in Gulf colors and a square blue watch, which is the image that sells the watch today. His taste in clothes made him a menswear reference point well beyond the track, as our Barbour wax jacket history shows.

The second life

In 1985 Techniques d'Avant Garde bought a majority stake in Heuer, and the company became TAG Heuer. By the late 1990s the Monaco's reputation had grown well past its sales record, and TAG Heuer brought back the 1133 in a limited run of 5,000. In 2003 the Monaco returned to the regular catalog with an entirely new mechanism, and in 2004 the company showed the Monaco V4, a concept watch, at Baselworld.

The anniversaries kept coming. In 2007 TAG Heuer released a Monaco in Gulf colors. For the 40th anniversary in 2009 it made a Monaco Classic with a Calibre 11, limited to 1,000 pieces. For the 50th in 2019 it released five decade-themed editions, each limited to 169 pieces. In 2022 a Monaco Gulf Special Edition became the first Gulf model with the in-house Heuer 02 movement.

The left-hand crown survives in the Calibre 11 Monacos TAG Heuer has made since, including the 2018 Gulf model. Like the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, it is a chronograph whose history now does most of the selling. If you are looking at a vintage 1133, read our guide on how to buy your first mechanical watch before you pay a McQueen premium for a watch with replaced parts.

For more, see watch history, film and the Quiet Menace watches section. The Wikipedia entry on Le Mans covers the troubled production, and TAG Heuer's magazine tells the McQueen story from the brand's side.

The Monaco was a square case nobody thought could keep water out, built around a movement with its crown on the wrong side. It took a borrowed racing suit to turn both of those facts into the reason people want one.