Chris Hemsworth wears a Heuer Carrera

Ron Howard's Rush, written by Peter Morgan, rebuilds the 1976 Formula One season as a contest between two opposite ideas of how to live. Daniel Brühl's Niki Lauda treats risk as an engineering problem to be measured and managed; Chris Hemsworth's James Hunt treats it as something closer to oxygen. The film turns on Lauda's crash at the Nürburgring, the fire and the burns and his decision to climb back into the car six weeks later, and ends with Hunt taking the title at the final race in Japan by a single point.

Hunt's watch is a Heuer Carrera, reference 1158 CHN: an 18-karat yellow gold case and bracelet, 38mm, with a champagne dial and black sub-registers, the CHN standing for Champagne Noir. It runs the Caliber 12 automatic, and fewer than 200 were ever made.

The watch carries a history the film seems not to have noticed. When Heuer signed on as Scuderia Ferrari's sponsor in the 1970s, Jack Heuer gave gold 1158 Carreras to Ferrari's drivers, roughly fifteen in all, with Lauda, Clay Regazzoni and Ronnie Peterson among the recipients. In the season Rush depicts, the gold 1158 was a Ferrari driver's watch, and Lauda actually owned one.

On screen, it ends up on the McLaren driver instead, while Brühl's Lauda wears a Heuer Silverstone. That swap was apparently an accident: the watches came as loans from the TAG Heuer museum, and by the account of watch writer Miguel Seabra, they were mixed up during filming, so the Carrera that belonged to Lauda's world wound up on Hunt's wrist.