Brad Pitt wears an IWC Ingenieur

The watch Brad Pitt wears in F1 started as his own. Ahead of filming he handed IWC a vintage Ingenieur SL, the reference 1832 that Gérald Genta designed in the 1970s, and asked for a resto-mod, because the original had all the right elements but was simply too thick. Slimming it meant removing the soft-iron inner cage that had shielded the movement from magnetic fields, so the engineers folded the protection into the face instead: the new dial is itself made of soft iron and forms the upper part of the Faraday cage. For that dial Pitt already had someone in mind, Cloister Watch Company, a New York studio that rebuilds vintage watches, and they made it in his character's signature olive green. The one-off later inspired a public version, the green-dialed Ingenieur Automatic 40, limited to 1,000 pieces.

Joseph Kosinski directed F1 after Top Gun: Maverick, shooting during real Grand Prix weekends across the 2023 and 2024 seasons, with Apple producing and Lewis Hamilton among the producers. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former driver brought back by the fictional APXGP team, and the character's past is borrowed from a real one: the production built Sonny's backstory on Martin Donnelly's near-fatal 1990 crash at Jerez, with Donnelly lending his own footage to the film. IWC was already inside the sport as the engineering partner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team, and inside the movie as an official sponsor of APXGP, its branding on the cars, the race suits, and the helmets.