Hamilton’s latest watch is a big, beautiful throwback to 1970s motorsport

US watchmaker Hamilton is taking motorsport fans back to the heady days of the 1970s with its latest timepiece.

Called the Chrono-Matic 50 Auto Chrono, the watch is limited to just 150 pieces worldwide and features an unashamedly vintage case design, a mechanical movement, a tackymeter and a colour scheme motorsport fans will love.

The striking stainless steel case, with its curved edges and integrated crown guard, measures 51.5 x 48.5 mm, making this a larger watch than most. The case is decorated by push buttons finished in orange and blue. It’s a colour scheme repeated generously across the dial, hands and perforated leather strap – and one motorsport fans will be familiar with, given its association with Gulf, the fuel company behind some of the most iconic race car liveries of all time.

Powered by an automatic chronograph movement, the watch measures elapsed time with counters for seconds, minutes and hours. Meanwhile, the tackymeter scale that runs around the outer edge of the dial can be used with the orange second hand to calculate the average speed of an object traveling a known distance – such as a racing car completing a lap of a track.

There’s also a date window at the six o’clock position, and a quick date corrector function operated by a pusher at the 10 o’clock position. Instead of turning the crown to advance the time through several days to correct the displayed date, each press of the pusher moves the date counter along by one.

Inside, the H-31 automatic chronograph movement has a power reserve of 60 hours, while Hamilton says the watch is water resistant to 10 bar (100 metres).

Presented on a perforated leather strap in blue and orange, the Hamilton Chrono-Matic 50 is limited to 150 examples – each with a unique number on the case back – and priced at £2,300.