Review: Jacob & Co. Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon

When it came to the Chiron, Bugatti stopped at absolutely nothing to create the most intense automotive experience ever devised by man. With 1,500bhp and a top speed of 300mph, its performance justified every bit of its $3.3m price tag. So, it makes sense that a watch that bears the same name be equally as impressive. Let’s take a look at the incredible Jacob & Co. Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon and find out.

Price

In the spirit of the almighty supercar from which it borrows its name, the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon packs a punch with every stat. It’s all about the numbers: if this thing were a Top Trumps card, it would be the one you’d all agree with your friends not to play, because it’s basically cheating.

The number we’ll start with is the one you need to know first if you fancy buying one: the price. Never mind the rest of it; if you can’t stump up the ponies to purchase one, the closest you’ll get are the pixels on your screen right now.

Prices start, if you cheap out and go for the titanium version, at—are you ready for it—$300,000. To be fair to Jacob & Co, in the world of Bugatti, $300,000 is merely an optional extra, and that’s no joke. Spec the exposed carbon fibre bodywork on your Chiron and you’ll be stumping up just ten grand shy of the price of this watch.

Sounds almost cheap when you compare it to the cost of a no-paint option. If you’re looking to spend more, you certainly can, because Jacob & Co.’s own no-paint option comes in the form of a completely transparent, no-metal sapphire case, machined from a solid block of lab-grown synthetic sapphire.

Yes, that’s sapphire as in the stuff jewels are made from, only here its kept free of impurities so it is completely transparent. What will also be completely transparent will be the look on your face when you hear the price of that one: $1.3m. It’s that or the front third of a real Chiron. And if you like your sapphire sapphire-coloured, you can get that too for the full $1.5m. That’s how much the Chiron’s predecessor, the Veyron, cost.

Tourbillon

So, what can a watch sporting an entry price of $300,000 be packing within its 42 by 36 by 16mm case? Well, slipped up inside the famous horseshoe radiator grille—oh yeah, the case looks just like a Bugatti Chiron, including the C-shape side scoops and triple exhaust crown setup—is a tourbillon on fan duty to keep the watch cool.

Or at least, that’s how I like to imagine it, because the 30-degree incline of the tourbillon is reminiscent of the fans bolted to the many radiators required to keep the real Chiron’s 8-litre, quad turbo W16 engine running cool as a cucumber.

Like the humble radiator, the tourbillon was actually invented to solve a practical problem rather than for its visual appeal. It’s the heart of the watch, a sprung wheel that bounces back and forth to manage the timing of the movement, keeping it ticking accurately.

But gravity plays its part in stopping that from happening. Especially when watches were worn in the pocket, the balance wheel, when angled like the wheel of a car, was in a constant battle with gravitational forces. So, the tourbillon was developed to rotate the entire balance around once per minute, so gravity affected the entire mechanism equally, therefore cancelling it out.

In the Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon, the device goes another step further still, with a 30-degree angle to the rest of the movement so it’s always attacking gravity at an angle. That and it tucks nicely into the nose, placing the open side of this “flying” arrangement in good view of the lucky owner.

Suspension and Other Cool Bits

Here’s a great line for you down the pub: “Does your watch have suspension?” It’s pretty much a cert that, unless your fellow beer-drinkers also own a Jacob & Co. Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon, that the answer is no. Their follow-up question may well be why does the Bugatti Chiron Tourbillon have suspension, and to be honest if they’re asking that then they probably shouldn’t be your friends anyway.

Asking that is like asking why the Bugatti Chiron needs ten times the power of the average family car to transport just two people around at a gag-inducing 8mpg. The answer is—because it’s cool. And so, the calibre JCAM37 finds itself suspended at all four corners with proper coilover suspension.

Jacob & Co. may have drawn the line at making bump and rebound adjustable on the suspension, but that’s far from the only part to draw engineering inspiration from the French supercar. Straddling the tourbillon are two exhaust-like pipes—unsurprisingly representative of the exhaust pipes—which lead their way to the back of the vehicle—er, watch—to the triple crown setup.

You might be thinking that the broom-broom Chiron—not the tick-tick Chiron—has just one big exhaust outlet, and upon first glance, you’d think yourself right. That picks up four of the six pipes, with the other two extra ones hidden either side within the diffuser. This blows air across the aerodynamic surface, supposedly increasing rear downforce.

That triple setup is mirrored right here on the Jacob & Co. with three crowns. The one on the left sets the time, the middle one winds the 60-hour power reserve—as seen on the power reserve indicator—and the right one—well, we’ll get onto that one in a minute.

The crazy thing is that adding the suspension made connecting the crowns an engineering nightmare as they’re fixed in place. To stop the crown stems snapping with the suspension compressed, they’re jointed, just like the Chiron’s driveshafts.

Engine

But the real piece of resistance, to use Bugatti-appropriate French, is what the button on the right-hand crown does when you press it. First, you wind with the middle crown—it winds both ways, one way for the timekeeping aspect of the movement and the other for watch’s party trick—and then you press the button.

That unleashes the sapphire blocked W16 wedged just as tightly in the back of the watch as it is in the car, with all 16 pistons turning with the crankshaft until the wind runs down. Thanks to the transparency of the sapphire, you can see every last little detail of it, and none of that $300,000 has been spared in making it look like the coolest thing on the planet.

There’s even a set of turbos on the side that also spin for the last degree of automotive accuracy, making sure to exhaust every last ounce of energy from the mainspring. It’s less watchmaking and more mechanical art. Without straps it makes the best—and probably most expensive—desk toy in the entire world.

To achieve all this was no mean feat. There are 578 components in this watch to make all that happen, and every last one has been hand-crafted to perfection. If you’re looking for slim and elegant, classic and reserved, this watch is obviously not for you. If you’re not looking to spend house money on a watch either, again, look elsewhere. But if you want the craziest watch in the world, the only one with a W16 engine in it—then you’ve only got one choice. Make sure to pick the colour that matches your actual Chiron!