The watch McQueen actually wore wasn't the Monaco
Hanhart's 417 ES Steve McQueen Limited Edition is the first watch officially licensed by the McQueen family. The story, the specs and the price reality.
Ask anyone which watch Steve McQueen wore and you’ll hear Monaco. Heuer built a legend on it after Le Mans. But the photographs tell a quieter story: McQueen in the dirt, in the desert, on a motorcycle, wearing a small German chronograph with a red pusher. It took decades for Hanhart to put his name on it.
The watch he actually lived in
The 417 ES is the watch McQueen wore away from the cameras. Pictures place it on his wrist at the 1964 International Six Days Trial in East Germany, at the Baja 1000 and in plain private life.
Now, with the approval of his grandchildren, Chase and Madison McQueen, Hanhart has made the first officially licensed McQueen watch. His signature sits on the dial, small and discreet, just beneath the shockproof inscription near six o’clock.
Faithful to the original
Everything else stays close to the watch he wore: a matte black dial, white Arabic numerals, a bi-compax layout and hands with slightly curved tips cut to reduce parallax error. The lume is Light Old Radium, tinted to look aged.
Why the pusher is red
The red pusher at four o’clock is a flyback button: it resets and restarts the chronograph in a single press. Legend says pilots’ wives once painted it red to bring their husbands home safe. Hanhart even slips a bottle of red nail polish into the box.
The best detail is the strap: a Shell Cordovan cuff from Italian tannery Comipel, padded underneath, a nod to how McQueen wore his watch. The limitation card echoes his 1964 racing licence, signed by Chase, Madison and the watchmaker who assembled it.
The essentials
- Case: stainless steel, 39 mm × 13.3 mm, 46 mm lug-to-lug
- Bezel: fluted, bidirectional, red insert
- Movement: Sellita AMT5100 M, hand-wound flyback chronograph, 28,800 vph, 58-hour power reserve
- Crystal: domed sapphire, screw-down display caseback
- Water resistance: 100 m
- Strap: Shell Cordovan cuff by Comipel
The price reality
€2,890, limited to 300 pieces. The legend wore a Monaco on screen. This is the one he wore when nobody was filming.
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