Some gifts are also sales. Chopard’s new Mille Miglia Rosso Corsa, reference 168619-3024, is a chronograph made in 100 pieces and sold only in Italy. What it offers Italians, at €11,300, is their own colour. Italy is the one country where every potential owner already has it.
The timing is not subtle, and is not meant to be. The 1000 Miglia turns a hundred in 2027. Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, Chopard’s co-president, says that with this watch the house will “begin looking forward to the race’s centenary”, and the watch is the first instalment of that looking. The industry of 2026 has become fluent in anniversaries the way earlier decades were fluent in complications: when the mechanics have nowhere new to go, the calendar does the work, and the dial becomes the cheapest surface on which to stage an event. Colour plus a date plus a border. It is a formula, and it works because collectors have learned to read scarcity as meaning.
For Chopard, the Mille Miglia line is the brand’s motoring arm, priced well below the L.U.C manufacture chronographs and carrying one of the family’s longest-running public stories. That story is real. Chopard has been the event’s sponsor since 1988, with the title of official timekeeper, and Scheufele has taken part every year since 1989. The Italy-only allocation is not new either. A 100-piece GTS chronograph reserved for Italian retailers in 2023 sold out, according to Time+Tide. The present watch goes back over ground that has already proved fertile.
What interests me is how the press release makes these decisions disappear.
Take the colour. “Italy was assigned red,” the release says, “a shade that would soon become synonymous with the country’s automotive excellence and sporting passion.” Note the agentless passive. Nobody assigns; red simply arrives, as if the national character had always been waiting for it. Yet the record is less tidy than the release: accounts of the early Gordon Bennett races disagree over whether red first belonged to the United States, and over when Italy made it its own. None of this makes Rosso Corsa less Italian. A century of Italian cars has settled that. But the release needs red to have been destiny rather than a decision, because otherwise the watch’s central proposition is a paint choice.
Then the race. The release speaks of “the enduring spirit of competition,” of “the legendary race”. The race, as a race, ended in 1957, after the crash at Guidizzolo killed the Marquis de Portago, his co-driver and nine spectators. Since 1977 the 1000 Miglia has been a regularity event for cars of the models that ran the original race. Crews are scored on hitting set times, not on beating them. The release does not hide this so much as let the word “race” carry nearly seventy years of difference without strain. Roland Barthes, who opened his essay on the new Citroën DS, collected in Mythologies in 1957, by calling cars the modern equivalent of Gothic cathedrals, had a word for this: myth.1 Myth, in his account, does not lie; it drains the history out of what it speaks of. Here it drains it out of a noun.
Then the movement, which the release introduces only as “the self-winding chronograph movement, certified by the Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres”. It is identified by its certificate, not its maker. Time+Tide identifies the calibre in the current Classic Chronographs as an upgraded member of ETA’s 2894-2 family. That is a perfectly good engine, made by someone else. The release does not deny this; it simply never names it.
And the tribute. Rosso Corsa has been done before, under the same name, on the same watch line. 2002, in titanium. 2011, on the GT XL. 2018, in steel, at 42 millimetres. Now.
A tribute performed at least four times is no longer a tribute. It is a repertory piece.
Which is not to say the object is careless. The dial is matte red varnish under a glossy clear lacquer, and over that sits a box sapphire. The red is therefore seen through two transparent layers, and it reads deeper than the dial actually is, like a coachbuilt panel under several coats. At the edge, a velvety silver flange carries the railway track. The knurled pushers, which the release says are “inspired by brake pedals,” give the thumb a coarse purchase before the chronograph engages. The crown is engraved with a steering wheel. At 40.5 by 12.88 millimetres in Lucent Steel, Chopard’s 80-per-cent-recycled alloy, it sits closer to period proportion than the 42-millimetre re-editions did. It is a well-judged watch. That, unfortunately for the argument, is the problem: most of its quality belongs to the collection, not to this edition.
Strip out what the edition alone contributes and you are left with a dial colour, a number and a border. The Italian buyer is being offered a way to buy back the flag from a Geneva house. The foreign buyer, excluded, is being offered the more refined pleasure of wanting something that has been withheld. Both are buying a seat in a club whose real admission fee is a car of a model that ran the original race, certified by the event’s own register. The watch is the portion of the Mille Miglia that fits in a sleeve.
The financial case is short. Chopard’s Italian site lists the unnumbered Mille Miglia Classic Chronograph in Rosso Amarena at €10,300: the same case, the same movement, a red of its own. The €1,000 difference buys the name of the red, the number 100 and the frontier. Whether a small allocation confined to one country becomes scarcity or merely a small market is something resale will decide, and nothing about the reference obliges it to decide kindly. As cultural capital, though, the watch is unusually precise. It is dated to the eve of a centenary, it is national, and it is legible to anyone in the paddock at Brescia.
So subtract. Remove the red, which was decided rather than inherited. Remove Italy, which is a sales territory. Remove the tribute, now in at least its fourth pressing, and the movement, which was bought. Remove Lucent Steel, which by Chopard’s own account has been used for every steel watch it has made since 2023.
Something survives, and it is not on the dial.
It is a man who has taken part in the event every year since 1989, at a Mille Miglia that is now decided by timing rather than speed. Even here a little myth clings: Chopard’s title is Official Timekeeper, but the regulations give the timing itself to Italy’s federation of timekeepers, whose pressure sensors read to the hundredth of a second. No matter. In a regularity event, elapsed time is not a costume borrowed from racing. It is the contest. Of all the complications a motoring watch can carry, the chronograph is the only one whose function this event still turns on, and this one comes from a house whose co-president keeps showing up to need it.
There is a great deal of red on this dial. Only one sliver of it does any work: the tip of the central chronograph hand, the one thing on the watch that stops.
Want it for that, and the wanting holds. Want it for the rest, and you are not a collector so much as a patriot, possibly of someone else’s country.
About the Author
Sergio Galanti is the founder and editor of WatchDossier, contributor to Italian and international watch publications, the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking, and advisor to private collectors.
No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.
Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French literary critic and semiotician. Mythologies (1957) collects short essays on French popular culture, from soap-powder advertisements and professional wrestling to steak-frites and the Citroën DS. Its closing theoretical essay, “Myth Today”, argues that a culture’s myths turn history into nature: what particular people chose, at a particular moment and for particular reasons, comes to look obvious, inevitable and eternal. The devices are often grammatical: sentences without an agent, verbs of essence, appeals to timelessness and continuity. Barthes coined “ex-nomination” for the way the dominant class of his day avoided naming itself; by extension, it describes any message that leaves out the name of whoever shaped it. WatchDossier uses the method descriptively. Calling a release mythological does not mean calling it false. It means noticing the gap between what was decided and the story told in its place.