At 3 PM local time on Sunday, October 4, which is 3 AM ET, the lights go out at the Sepang International Circuit in Kuala Lumpur for one of the stranger fixtures on this year’s calendar. Round 16 of the season is the Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, 56 laps of the 5.543-kilometer Sepang track. Eleven teams line up, now that Cadillac has joined the grid, making it a good moment to take stock of the F1 watches of 2026.
TAG Heuer is Formula 1's Official Timekeeper. Eight of the 11 teams have a watch partner, with Richard Mille at both Ferrari and McLaren and newcomers Breitling at Aston Martin and Girard-Perregaux at Williams. Cadillac, Audi and Haas list none.
Watchmaking and Formula 1 have been tied together since the 1970s, and in 2026 the connection runs from the sport itself down to individual teams. Eight of the 11 teams have a watch partner listed on their official sites; the sport has an official timekeeper; and three teams, including the newcomer, race without a watch partner at all. We checked every pairing below against the team’s or the brand’s own pages, rather than relying on secondhand lists.
The Official Timekeeper
The biggest name belongs to the sport itself. Since 2025, LVMH has been a Global Partner of Formula 1 under a 10-year agreement, alongside its Maisons Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy and TAG Heuer. Formula 1 describes TAG Heuer as the first watch brand to sponsor a Formula 1 team, in 1971, and notes that it was the Official Timekeeper of the sport from 1992 to 2003 before reclaiming the role from the 2025 season. Its Monaco, Carrera and Formula 1 collections all draw on that history, and we have tracked the brand’s output this year in our roundup of every TAG Heuer release of 2026.
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TAG Heuer also appears on the partner page of Oracle Red Bull Racing, which calls the brand “steeped in motorsport history†and recalls the TAG Heuer watches worn by Ayrton Senna, Juan Manuel Fangio and Steve McQueen. In our view, there is a neat symmetry in the brand that keeps the sport’s official time also being on the car of one of its most successful modern teams.
The Team Watch Partners
Mercedes-AMG Petronas has one of the longest relationships on the grid. IWC Schaffhausen has been the team’s Official Engineering Partner since 2013, and the two describe their shared approach as “Performance Engineering.†The team’s own page lists two team watches, the Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 Edition Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team Watch and the Pilot’s Performance Chronograph 41 Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team Watch. IWC has continued to issue race-specific variations through the season, including the violet Pilot’s Watch Chronograph 41 for the Singapore Grand Prix we covered last month.
Scuderia Ferrari’s watch partner is Richard Mille, which appears on the team’s official partner roster. On its own site, Richard Mille describes a multi-year partnership that covers Formula 1 as well as the World Endurance Championship, and says the collaboration with Ferrari’s designers and engineers produced the RM UP-01, the brand’s thinnest watch.
Richard Mille also works with McLaren, which makes it the only watchmaker with two teams on the grid. McLaren announced the long-term partnership in 2016, and a year later the two, working with the University of Manchester, produced the RM 50-03, which Richard Mille calls the lightest mechanical chronograph in the world, drawing on cutting-edge graphene research. In January, McLaren said Richard Mille would also become an Official Partner of its McLaren United AS Hypercar team when it enters the World Endurance Championship in 2027.
Aston Martin brought the most significant new arrival of the year. On February 5, the team named Breitling its Official Watch Partner in a global, multi-year deal covering both the road-car company and the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team. The team calls it Breitling’s return to Formula 1. The first co-branded piece, the Navitimer B01 Chronograph 43 Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team, is limited to 1,959 pieces, a nod to the year Aston Martin entered the sport. It has the first titanium case ever used on a Navitimer, a carbon fiber dial, Aston Martin Racing Green and lime accents, and the COSC-certified Manufacture Caliber 01 with a 70-hour power reserve.
Williams made the other notable change. Girard-Perregaux is now the team’s Haute Horlogerie Partner, in a partnership the team says formed in January 2026. On September 17, the two launched their first watches, the Laureato Chronograph Williams Edition 42mm and the Laureato Williams Edition 42mm. Both have a blue Clous de Paris dial inspired by the FW48 that Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz race this season, with red details echoing the keyline on the car’s nose, and both are sold exclusively on Girard-Perregaux’s website. Our full report on the pair is here.
At Alpine, the partner is the independent Swiss watchmaker H. Moser & Cie., a Premium Partner of the BWT Alpine Formula One Team. The brands began working together in 2024, and they say the aim “was never simply to place a logo on a dial.†To open the 2026 season, Moser released a pink version of its Streamliner Alpine Drivers and Mechanics Edition, a flyback chronograph and a connected watch designed for pit-lane work, sold as a set limited to 50. In September it followed with the Streamliner Tourbillon Skeleton Ceramic Alpine Limited Edition, the partnership’s third model, in an anthracite ceramic case around the skeletonized HMC 814 caliber with blue bridges.
In our view, Alpine and Moser are the most interesting pairing on the grid. A small independent producing around 4,000 watches a year has no obvious reason to be in Formula 1, yet it has built a team watch for drivers and another for mechanics, and made the mechanics’ piece a tool rather than a souvenir.
Rounding out the list, Visa Cash App Racing Bulls carries Tudor, and this season the brand’s logo has moved onto the full span of the car’s rear wing. The team describes it as a deepening of an existing partnership and pairs the two around a shared motto, “born to dare, engineered to perform.†Neither the team’s page nor any other official page we found names a 2026 Racing Bulls edition, so we will wait before naming one.
The Teams Without a Watch
Three teams have no watchmaker on their official partner pages. Cadillac, the new 11th team, lists Tommy Hilfiger as its official apparel partner but no watch partner. Audi, in its first season on the grid under its own name, counts adidas, ic! berlin and Revolut among its partners but no watchmaker. TGR Haas F1 Team, renamed this year under its title partnership with Toyota Gazoo Racing, does not list one either.
Our take: with Breitling and Girard-Perregaux joining this year, watch partnerships in Formula 1 are growing, not shrinking. That makes the empty slots at Audi and Cadillac stand out. Both are big manufacturer projects backed by brands that sell on design, and both have the kind of story a watchmaker usually wants to tell. We would not be surprised to see at least one filled before the 2027 season. For now, the watch to look for on Sunday at Sepang depends on which garage you are watching.
Timely FAQs
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