Unboxing - Mika Häkkinen Challenge

By Artisans de Genève.

 This watch was commissioned by a racing legend, at least for my generation, Mr. Mika Häkkinen, double F1 world champion, a pilot who had suffered a very severe racing accident and fell in a coma for a couple of weeks and no one knew how or if he could recover from this, but he did and magnificently too. One of those amazing and inspiring comebacks in sporting history and demonstrating his immense will power. 

So let’s start with the dial side and it’s been seriously openworked.

The dial itself is made out of titanium with a nice deep grey colour and is partly held in place with these screws and bolts, but their function is more of a design one and accentuating the mechanical dimension of the watch.

The anthracite coloured bezel is also made out of titanium and has a special grainy finishing, a bezel onto which you will find the tachymetre scale, normal coming from a racing driver, but the design particularity comes with the colours useds for the inscriptions with this orange and light blue color scheme, colors that really work well together and something you will also find on other elements, such as the hands of the chrono’s subdials, naturally also openworked, orange on the tip of the center second hand.

This dial side expresses a lot of technicality with these many different materials, these different types of finishing, this see-through aspect and at the same time it’s quite elegant. You can definitely wear this on a sporty and/or casual occasion, but also with a suit, not that I wear any that often, but I think it works too. 

Another thing I do like is to be able to directly see the barrel spring, especially when you wind the watch, because yes, this no automatic watch. They removed the rotor which you would normally find on the original version and this is now indeed a manually hand wound watch, quite cool right and it holds 72 hours of power reserve and I have to say that I really like how they modified the crown with this little cutout in the middle and this orange color reminder, super cool!

But most importantly by making it hand wound, this has freed up space when you look at it from the case side and it lets you see much better the amount of work they put in the movement in terms of details, finishing technique used and this thanks to another distinct feature of this reinterpretation with this full sapphire glass and for info the entire case back is also made out of titanium with these special engraved inscriptions. 

Well, all in all, I think the result is pretty cool and very original. I had already seen a few of these modified watches by Les Artisans de Genève, I personally really liked the Montoya edition, but having in my hands the watch that one of my heroes is soon going to receive makes this little moment even more special and unique. Thank you Mr. Häkkinen and thanks for the inspired input you gave to these guys, because the result is truly cool and just last information, you will be able to swap bracelets pretty easily from this steel version to a leather one which comes along.