Matt Damon wears a Heuer Carrera

After Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles trade punches on Miles's front lawn, the two of them end up flat on their backs in the grass, drinking Cokes among scattered groceries, and the white-dialed chronograph on Shelby's wrist sits right in the frame. James Mangold's Ford v Ferrari (2019) tells the true story of how Shelby (Matt Damon), the Texan racing driver turned car builder, and Miles (Christian Bale), the gifted and abrasive British test driver, built the Ford GT40 to beat Ferrari at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The watch is a Heuer Carrera, reference 7753 SN, a two-register chronograph with a silver dial, black sub-dials and a black leather racing strap. Jack Heuer had launched the Carrera in 1963, naming it for the Carrera Panamericana, the brutal Mexican road race. There is a wrinkle: the 7753 SN did not reach the market until around 1970, four years after the events the film depicts, so it is a quiet anachronism. It is on screen because the production's costume team went to TAG Heuer to source the watches, and this is the Carrera they settled on.

It still fits. The Carrera dates to the independent, pre-TAG era of Heuer, when the company built its name on motor racing, supplying dashboard timers and stopwatches to the teams and drivers Shelby and Miles came up against.