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TIMELESS
FINNIES THE JEWELLER
BELOW: Breitling talk the talk and fly the walk, boasting a display team
of seven L39 Albatros military trainers, piloted by highly experienced ex-French Navy hotshots. If you’re lucky enough, and your stomach is strong enough, you can ride along
WATCH THESE SPACES
It isn’t just Breitling Chronométrie (breitling.com) that welcomes careful drivers. Dotted throughout the Swiss Jura are some of the world’s finest watch factories, with facilities that – if you navigate the winding foothills successfully – reward the mildest of curiosities...
LONGINES
Tucked into the quaint village of St Imier, north-east of La Chaux-de-Fonds and at the tip of ‘Watch Valley’, Longines has been here for all of its 180-plus years, and its history is duly celebrated by a museum of great variety and richness.
TISSOT
Head the other way from Breitling down Watch Valley, and you’ll quickly reach
Le Locle, where another extraordinary cluster of brands is concentrated. Tissot is the biggest – it’s one of only three Swiss brands in the so-called ‘Billion Club’, named after its total production over the years – and its brand-new roboticised logistics and parts storage facility is like something out of a sci-fi epic.
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There’s even a laboratory where chemists, physicists and mathematicians scrutinise and improve the tiniest things with electron microscopes and torque meters. One robot analyses the ‘feel’ of Breitling’s chronograph pushbuttons – just as Bentley has honed the exact ‘clunk’ of its doors.
This is high-end industry all right: in keeping with a brand that has also developed strong ties to the skies. Our factory tour guide, suave vice-president Jean-Paul Girardin, commutes to work from Grenchen in an Explorer 900 helicopter. “At Breitling,” he says nonchalantly, “we’re not just talking about aviation, we’re living it!”
On the way back north, we take the opportunity to make a diversion via Dijon for the final part of our immersion into all things Breitling and Bentley. It’s here that Breitling’s aviation link goes way beyond the vice-president choppering into work every morning. As if we were in any doubt about the brand’s flyboy credentials (despite the fact most professional pilots wear a slide-rule Navitimer pilot’s watch as a rule), Breitling operates its very own jet display team. Obviously.
So, abandoning our muddied GTC at Dijon Air Base, we put our chronographs (and stomachs) to the test at 6,000 feet, under 5g. It certainly is an extravagant bit of marketing, a jet display team. Probably even more extravagant than using John Travolta to front your ad campaigns. But when you begin to piece things together – everything from the Bentley connection, to the state-of-the- art factory, to hiring seven ex-Navy pilots and buying seven L39 Albatros military trainers – you soon realise that Breitling simply want to do everything ‘right’, and in the finest way possible.
And if it takes a three-day roadtrip in a GTC V8 S through mountain scenery wearing a cool watch and doing a loop-the-loop in a jet along the way to come to that realisation, then so be it.