Steve McQueen wears a Heuer Monaco

In 1970, Jack Heuer carried a selection of his chronographs to France and handed them to Don Nunley, the prop master on Le Mans. Steve McQueen looked them over and reached first for an Omega, until Nunley pointed at the Heuer patch already sewn onto his white Gulf racing suit and told him Michael Delaney would hardly wear an Omega when his shoulder read Heuer. The patch traced back to Jo Siffert, the Swiss Porsche racer McQueen had taken as the model for his character and the first driver Heuer ever sponsored. Siffert wore a Heuer Autavia. McQueen took the square one: the Monaco reference 1133B with the matt blue dial, one of about six Nunley had on the production. The Heritage auction catalogue for a screen-worn example calls the result an early case of product placement and notes that McQueen's "sleeve is often conspicuously pushed up to reveal the watch for the cameras." The surviving frames bear that out, the cuff riding above the square case.

Heuer had released the Monaco in 1969 to carry the Calibre 11, one of the first automatic chronograph movements, developed with Breitling, Hamilton-Buren and Dubois-Dépraz. The module-and-microrotor construction put the chronograph pushers on the right and the crown alone on the left at nine o'clock, the quirk that still identifies a Calibre 11 Monaco at a glance. The film around the watch nearly broke its makers. John Sturges quit over the script and the production's management, Lee H. Katzin replaced him, the racing footage came from camera cars running in the actual 1970 24 Hours, and the insurers refused to let McQueen drive the real race. The picture failed commercially; the watch became the most famous thing in it.

The screen-worn Monacos scattered after the shoot, and two of them surfaced at auction decades later. The one Heritage catalogued, with its notarized letter from Nunley and an owner's manual factory-typed "24 h at Le Mans 1970," sold in July 2012 and is known to collectors simply as "The McQueen." Another went, at the end of filming, to Haig Alltounian, the film's chief mechanic and McQueen's personal mechanic, engraved TO HAIG Le MANS 1970. Alltounian kept it for fifty years, then consigned it himself to Phillips' Racing Pulse sale in New York, where on December 12, 2020, it brought $2,208,000, the most ever paid for a Heuer at auction.