Aston Martin Valkyrie, Tourbillon Movements, NFTs & Watches
Production starting, What makes a Tourbillon Movement special, and NFTs helping the watch space
Aston Martin Valkyrie
The highly anticipated Aston Valkrie production has finally begun! The Valkrie, a car with the looks of a futuristic batmobile, has a 6.5L V12 that revs to 11,000 RPMs. It is paired with a Rimac KERS hybrid system to produce 1140hp. weighing in at 1050kg (2300 pounds), the power to weight ratio is superior to the Koenigsegg One:1, which boasts 1hp per kg. Capable of creating 4,000 pounds of downforce at 250mph and taking turns at 3.5Gs (compare that to an F1 car that corners at 4-5Gs), this car is an absolute monster.
Officially the starting price tag is 4.2m, there will be 150 coupes, 85 spiders, and for the clients that the numbers above aren’t sufficient, there is an AMR Pro track-only variant they are making 25 of. Hopefully, we are able to see a few of these scream on the track soon!
Tourbillon Movements
Pretty much everyone is awestruck by the tourbillon movement. Seen as a movement inside of a rotating cage, it’s something every watch lover could look at for hours. Equally as awestruck are people when they see the prices of them. Seen fetching low 100s as a starting point, they definitely require a pretty penny to obtain. Given the price, I’ve asked myself a billion times (get it??) what makes them to special, and what the movement is really doing.
In the late 1700s, early 1800s, instead of wristwatches, people used pocket watches. Typically sitting in the front pocket of their shirt/jacket, they stayed in an upwards position most of the day. Seems like not a big problem, but gravity takes more of a toll on the movement in the watch than you might think. Gravity causes the escapement, also known as the pulse of the watch, which consists of the hairspring, balance wheel, and pallet fork to get out of sync with the balance (which provides the watch the ability to keep accurate time). Thus, when staying in the upwards position all day, pocket watches would quickly tell the wrong time, and they weren’t as easy to reset as watches are in the digital era. It was very important to tell as accurate time as possible - thus the Tourbillon was born.
In 1795, Abraham-Louis Breguet invented the movement. His thought process was instead of leaving the movement in a single position, why don’t we just rotate the movement in a circle. By doing this, each part of the movement is acted on by gravity equally. The “Rotating Cage” as its called, houses the escapement and balance. It rotates in a full circle once a minute, thus gravity does not put either of these crucial timing pieces of the watch out of sync. By protecting the movement like this, there is also a side benefit of the watch being much more shock-resistant. Golfing can easily put a watch out of balance, but if you remember when I talked about Bubba Watson and his Richard Milles - they are all tourbillons making them shock-resistant while he is sporting them on tour.
What’s your favorite Tourbillon? Ill Start!
NFTs & Watches
For those not fully immersed in the crypto community, a recent thing that has swept the community is NFTs (Non-fungible tokens). They are JPEGs that people can buy using crypto. Some come with just the picture, but I have also seen them come with a physical asset when you purchase the digital asset. This is exactly where watches come into play with this.
Kevin O’Leary has identified a couple of use cases that could make NFTs very helpful in the watch community
Authenticating a watch
When buying a watch in the grey market, typically you either have to really know what to look for, or bring it to a dealer to open it up and identify it as real. This can be a really time-consuming process, and there is always a risk in opening a watch. Instead of doing this, every watch could have an NFT attached to it to identify it as real.Identifying a watch
Kevin has a watch that we wore on every episode for the first 13 seasons of Shark Tank. It was a Daytona with a red strap. He sold it, and would like to buy that exact watch back, how can he do that? It would be really easy to search for the NFT corresponding to that watch and make an offer to whoever now owns it. Without this, anybody could throw a red strap on a Daytona and say it was his watch.Price History
With buying and selling through NFTs, it would be easy to keep a history of the watch’s value over time. You can see what people paid through all the hands it passed through and like I said earlier, you can make an offer on any watch at any time.
What to look forward to:
October CPI data comes out November 10th, I will talk about that next week!
Brazilian Grand Prix (sorry for not covering the Mexican GP this week, but Max pulled it out with Hamilton and Perez in 2nd and 3rd. Max now leads by 19 in the standings.)
I picked up a new watch this week, I’ll release the news here next week!