F1 Watches: What Formula 1 Drivers Actually Wear

Last updated: August 2026

Most of the 2026 Formula 1 grid wears Richard Mille, TAG Heuer or IWC, because those three brands hold the team contracts. Richard Mille supplies both Ferrari and McLaren, TAG Heuer supplies Oracle Red Bull Racing and carries the Official Timekeeper title for the sport itself, and IWC has been with Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS since 2013 as the team's official engineering partner.

Those four teams account for eight of the twenty-two race seats. Four more teams split between Breitling at Aston Martin, Tudor at Racing Bulls, H. Moser & Cie. at Alpine and Girard-Perregaux at Williams. Drivers whose teams have no watch partner buy their own, and what they choose is worth a look. This guide covers why racing watches are chronographs in the first place, which brands hold which contracts in 2026, what each driver has been photographed wearing, and how to think about buying a racing chronograph yourself. Formula 1 returned from the summer break at Zandvoort on 21 to 23 August.

Why Racing Watches Are Chronographs

A chronograph is a watch with a stopwatch built into it. Press the top pusher to start timing, press it again to stop, press the bottom pusher to zero the hand. Motorsport gave that function a job, and the job shaped the watch.

The tachymeter scale you see printed on a bezel or a dial flange converts elapsed time into average speed. Start the chronograph at a marker, stop it exactly one mile or one kilometer later, and read the speed off the scale where the seconds hand lands. No calculation required. That single trick is why racing watches look the way they do, with a busy outer ring of numbers running from about 400 down to 60.

The flyback complication goes one step further. A conventional chronograph takes three separate presses to stop, zero and start again. A flyback does all three on one press, so the hand never has to sit idle between measurements. Longines received patent protection for the mechanism on 16 June 1936 and put it into serial production in the calibre 13ZN. The French name for it, retour en vol, points at the original application: pilots timing one leg of a navigation route straight into the next. Timing consecutive laps is the same problem.

The three watches most people picture when they hear "racing watch" all arrived inside six years of one another. Rolex became official timekeeper of Daytona International Speedway in 1962, and the Cosmograph reference 6239 that followed in 1963 carried a tachymeter engraved on its metal bezel and eventually took the Daytona name on the dial. Heuer launched the Carrera the same year, designed by Jack Heuer and named for the Carrera Panamericana road race in Mexico. In 1969 Heuer added the Monaco, a square water-resistant chronograph running the Calibre 11 automatic movement, which Steve McQueen wore throughout the 1971 film Le Mans.

Which Watch Brands Are Actually in F1 in 2026

TAG Heuer has been Official Timekeeper of Formula 1 since the 2025 season. The title came through LVMH's ten-year global partnership with the sport, which began with the 2025 season and runs through 2034 (Sportcal). TAG Heuer held the same job from 1992 to 2003, so 2025 was a return to a role it had done before.

Rolex held the Official Timepiece title before that and stepped away at the end of the 2024 season, closing a run of more than a decade. Rolex did not leave motorsport. In 2026 the brand marks twenty-five years as Official Timepiece and Exclusive Major Partner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans and ten years with the FIA World Endurance Championship. In January 2026 Daytona International Speedway announced a long-term extension keeping Rolex as title sponsor and Official Timepiece of the Rolex 24 (Rolex Newsroom and IMSA, January 2026).

Richard Mille works team by team. It signed Ferrari in 2021, a deal that covers Scuderia Ferrari in Formula 1 along with the WEC, GT and Ferrari Challenge programs. The first watch out of that partnership was the RM UP-01 Ferrari, 1.75 mm thick and limited to 150 pieces. The McLaren relationship started in 2016 and produced the RM 50-03 first, then the RM 11-03 Automatic Flyback Chronograph McLaren, limited to 500 pieces in Carbon TPT with papaya orange running through the dial and strap. For the full picture on the brand, read our complete Richard Mille guide.

What the 2026 Grid Wears

Team contracts explain most of what shows up in the paddock. Where a driver has a personal deal on top of the team deal, the watch usually carries his name.

Max Verstappen (Red Bull). TAG Heuer, in line with the team partnership that has run since 2016. Robb Report documented him wearing the TAG Heuer Formula 1 x Kith at the Miami Grand Prix, and Man of Many reported that he was handed a personalized Monaco Split-Seconds with "World Champion" engraved on the reverse at an event on Monaco's Port Hercules.

Lando Norris (McLaren). Richard Mille. His most-photographed piece is the RM 72-01 Automatic Flyback Chronograph, the first Richard Mille built around an in-house chronograph calibre, the CRMC1.

Oscar Piastri (McLaren). Richard Mille RM 67-02 Automatic Extra Flat. DMARGE documented him at the Miami Grand Prix in the Alexander Zverev colorway, which is finished in the colors of the German flag. The RM 67-02 weighs about 32 grams complete, which is the point of it for someone racing in one.

Charles Leclerc (Ferrari). Richard Mille, and the longest personal relationship on the grid. Richard Mille's own partner page describes the brand as having supported him for over ten years. Two watches carry his name: the RM 67-02 Charles Leclerc in red and white Carbon TPT and Quartz TPT, and the RM 72-01 Charles Leclerc.

Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari). Richard Mille. The move to Ferrari moved the watch contract with it. He has been associated with the RM 43-01 Manual Winding Tourbillon Split-Seconds Chronograph Ferrari, offered in titanium at roughly $1.3 million and in Carbon TPT at roughly $1.5 million, 75 pieces of each (Highsnobiety, 2025). The South China Morning Post also documented him in an RM 74-02 Automatic Tourbillon at the Shanghai sprint.

George Russell (Mercedes). IWC. Ahead of the 2026 season IWC released two signature editions with him: the Pilot's Watch Chronograph 41 George Russell (IW389411) at $12,900 and the Pilot's Watch Automatic 41 George Russell (IW328107), both in black zirconium oxide ceramic with his racing blue as the accent, and both limited to 1,063 pieces.

Pierre Gasly (Alpine). H. Moser & Cie., which became Alpine Motorsports' official timing partner in 2024 and signed Gasly as its first ambassador. The Streamliner Tourbillon Pierre Gasly landed on the eve of the 2025 Singapore Grand Prix in red gold with a chocolate fumé dial, in a 100-piece run plus ten examples on a full red gold bracelet with a baguette ruby at ten o'clock.

Carlos Sainz (Williams). Girard-Perregaux, which signed with Williams as Official Watch Partner in February 2026 after its Aston Martin agreement ended. Oracle Time's February 2026 grid survey puts him in a Girard-Perregaux Laureato.

The interesting group is the drivers with no team watch partner at all. Oracle Time's February 2026 grid survey lists Nico Hülkenberg at Audi in an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and his team-mate Gabriel Bortoleto in a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona. Audi has no announced watch partner, so nobody handed those over, and they are the same two names that dominate the pre-owned market we work in every day.

Racing Watches Beyond the Paddock

The link between motorsport and chronographs is older than any current contract, and the two clearest reference points sit outside the 2026 grid.

Ayrton Senna is the driver most closely tied to a single watch. TAG Heuer's own archive puts the partnership's official start at 1988 and has him wearing the S/el chronograph by the middle of the 1989 season. The S-link bracelet became shorthand for him, and TAG Heuer has issued Senna special editions ever since. We cover the full run in our guide to Ayrton Senna's watches.

The other reference point is recent. F1: The Movie, released in 2025 with Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, took IWC as its watch partner. Pitt's character wears a bespoke Ingenieur built for the film on the bones of the Ingenieur SL reference 1832, developed with IWC, Pitt himself and the Cloister Watch Company design studio, with a green dial. Damson Idris's character wears the Pilot's Watch Performance Chronograph 41 in 18-carat 5N gold with a black ceramic tachymeter bezel. We break down every piece on screen in the watches in the F1 movie.

Endurance racing is where Rolex still runs the clock. The brand ties together the three races of the Triple Crown of Endurance: the Rolex 24 At Daytona, the Twelve Hours of Sebring and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with the FIA World Endurance Championship on top of it. That is a longer continuous motorsport program than any Formula 1 watch deal currently running.

Buying a Racing Chronograph

Two decisions cover most of it. First, flyback or standard chronograph. A flyback resets and restarts on one press, which matters if you actually time laps and is a genuine mechanical upgrade if you do not. Second, tachymeter or no tachymeter. A tachymeter bezel is the visual signature of the category, and it is functional, but plenty of chronographs skip it and read cleaner for daily wear.

We are an independent pre-owned and grey-market dealer with no authorized-dealer relationships, so everything here trades on the open market at our own pricing. Richard Mille is the F1 brand we handle most. Our Richard Mille collection has included the RM 011-03 McLaren in Carbon TPT from the limited edition of 500, several RM 72-01 flyback chronographs in titanium, black ceramic and white ceramic, and RM 67-02 Automatic Extra Flat examples in the same family Leclerc, Norris and Piastri race in. Availability moves constantly, so what is shown there is what we have listed.

The RM 72-01 also comes in a Le Mans Classic execution, one of the motorsport-named Richard Mille references we have listed.

Richard Mille RM 72-01 Le Mans Classic - $500,000

If you want the racing chronograph well below that, the Rolex Daytona is the reference the whole category orbits, and it is the deepest part of what we list. Our Max Verstappen collection guide and our Lewis Hamilton collection guide go deeper on what the two most-decorated drivers on the current grid have worn.

Formula 1 restarted at Zandvoort on 21 to 23 August 2026, round twelve of the season. It was the fifth of six sprint weekends on the calendar and the first F1 Sprint run on Dutch soil, and under the current contract it was set to be the last Dutch Grand Prix at the circuit. Max Verstappen's home race, on the way out.

Sources and methodology: partnership dates and titles are taken from Formula1.com, Monochrome, Time+Tide, Sportcal, Motorsport.com, the Rolex Newsroom, IMSA, Ferrari.com and Richard Mille's own partner pages. Driver watch sightings are attributed in the text to the outlet that documented them, including Robb Report, Monochrome, SJX Watches, the South China Morning Post, Highsnobiety, DMARGE, Man of Many and Oracle Time's February 2026 grid survey. Where a driver's exact reference is documented by a single outlet, that outlet is named in the text. Retail figures are the brands' published prices at launch as reported by those outlets and are quoted as approximate; secondary and grey market pricing varies by condition, year, accessories and dealer, and Watches Off 5th holds no authorized-dealer relationship with any brand named here. Watches Off 5th prices reflect our own listings in August 2026 and change with availability, condition, year and included accessories. 2026 Dutch Grand Prix scheduling per Formula1.com.