When IWC launched its first Mercedes team chronograph in Miami, 2022, Kimi Antonelli was merely fifteen and Formula 1 seat was still a rumour. On Sunday, November 1, Kimi Antonelli took the podium in Mexico City after winning the Formula One World Drivers' Championship in 2026 with Mercedes, becoming the youngest-ever World Drivers' Champion.
The Italian racing driver broke the most unforgiving title in motorsport which was previously held by Sebastian Vettel who did it first in 2010 at the age of 23. Not only did he break Vettel's record, Kimi also became the first Italian in 70 years to to get the F1 title. He lifted the Championship trophy wearing a Mercedes-themed green and black titanium Pilot’s Watch (Ref. IW388108) on his wrist.
Here's what makes the Swiss watch by IWC Schaffhausen, the coolest partner in Kimi Antonelli's celebration:
On the podium, Antonelli wore the IWC Pilot's Watch Chronograph 41 made for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team, reference IW388108, in black dial and Petronas green. It is not the newest watch in the bag. IWC launched it at the first Miami Grand Prix in 2022, when Antonelli was fifteen and a Formula 1 seat was still a prospect.
On the biggest night of his life, he reached for the original. It is easy to be cynical about this. Antonelli is contractually required to wear IWC on official duties, and a watch worn under contract is closer to a uniform than a statement. But the man himself has called them another way to express yourself, and has previously said publicly that he is trying to collect enough to suit every kind of occasion.
The case of the Pilot watch by IWC is 41 mm titanium, which keeps it light on a wrist that spends its working life bracing against g-forces. The green runs through the three chronograph counters, the hour and minute markers and the rubber strap, and, in a detail not every watchmaker bothers with, the day and date display.
Inside is IWC's in-house 69385 calibre, beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour with a 46-hour power reserve, its subdials arranged vertically rather than in the usual side-by-side layout. It retails for $9,200 (around ₹₹873,551 to ₹877,128) which in this sport barely qualifies as a purchase.
A chronograph is, at heart, a machine for measuring short intervals: a lap, a pit stop, the few hundredths that separate a podium from a footnote. Antonelli has lived inside those intervals for most of his life. He joined the Mercedes junior programme in 2019, at twelve. In 2025, aged eighteen, he took the seat Hamilton vacated, an inheritance that usually arrives with a decade of unflattering comparisons. Instead, on Sunday, he stood one step below Hamilton on the podium with the championship in his pocket, and the older man applauded.
What a stopwatch can't measure is what comes next. The record Antonelli has just set may well outlast him. It is hard to imagine anyone winning a title much younger, which means he has done the one thing he was built for with his entire adult life still ahead of him. The sport will spend years asking what a man does with that.