We’ve seen nearly every possible watch brand and F1 partnership materialise over the years and eventually fade away. Even the near-impossible thought of the entire sport no longer being sponsored by Rolex happened in recent years. So, when Tudor first teamed up with the Red Bull development team VCARB, I had my questions. And while we have had a handful of very fun and creative collaborative watches come out of this partnership, I realised the only way to truly understand how these two seemingly different entities work together was to visit them on their home turf. Having already done a big tour of Tudor and its suppliers earlier in the year, I now had the opportunity to visit the VCARB manufacture in Faenza, Italy.
While you can look at the automotive history of a brand like TAG Heuer and draw a logical line to them being the official timing partner of the sport and of the Red Bull team, it can be harder to make that kind of case for Tudor. However, if you consider the position and mentality of the VCARB team and compare it with Tudor, it all starts to make sense.
Tudor has always been known as the little brother of Rolex, more affordable yet just as reliable. And in the same way that the drivers from the VCARB team are looking to test themselves in an F1 seat before graduating to Red Bull, we see Tudor testing more adventurous ideas in its watches before possibly seeing them enter the Rolex catalogue. It’s this willingness to push themselves in trying something new where I see a real overlap between these two teams.
The audacious nature of Tudor and its recent releases from the Daring Collection have epitomised exactly how far the brand is willing to push boundaries and try new things. Consider how VCARB is willing to take on young, hungry drivers looking for their first seat in F1 and get them genuinely in the pack with this year’s results, I believe that shows just how closely related these two brands are at their cores.
And I got to experience that when I sat opposite Peter Bayer, the VCARB CEO, at dinner on the final night of my visit, where we got to talking about how he came into the role and what this partnership really means to him. You have to bear in mind, this F1 team has 24 official sponsors and partners they work with directly, and whose logos can be found across their kit and cars. But when I got chatting with Peter about Tudor, you could see his passion for the brand’s ethos above all else. When Peter came into the team in 2023, he brought with him a culture that you could viscerally feel as you walked the halls of their manufacture. New ideas were free-flowing, and the team culture was at an all-time high. This was probably helped by the fact that the team are currently fifth in the standings, directly behind their senior team.
Having been lucky enough to tour both companies’ facilities, you can tell they are equally committed to making the most of the latest technology. Whether it’s Tudor’s automated robots that run its testing facility, or the simulator VCARB uses that’s mounted on hydraulics, which accurately mimics every F1 track the team will face, even down to the texture of the road.
I also noticed a parallel between them in the level of cooperation that is needed between different sites. When I visited the many suppliers that work with Tudor earlier this year, the major impression I was left with was that the level of coordination that is required across all of these sites in order to get one watch built, and it was was staggering. And while touring VCARB in Faenza, we were constantly reminded of their sister site in Milton Keynes in England’s Motorsport Valley. There is a constant level of communication between these two centres that allows this F1 team to operate. So when a carbon fibre component is designed and constructed in Italy, it gets shipped to Milton Keynes, where it can be tested in the wind tunnel before making its way to the car. This is why, despite the team’s headquarters being in Italy, their operational language is English. And that makes communication a lot easier across the team’s 57 nationalities.
It is often said that Tudor is a young brand. Look at the bright dials of the Daring Collection or marketing campaigns about taking risks, and you can see the young audience represented. While the two drivers for VCARB are well within that young demographic, with Liam Lawson being 24 and Arvid Lindblad only 19, this youthful energy is carried over to the rest of the VCARB team, as the average age of the Faenze staff is just 34.
You do not get the opportunity to visit a facility like this every day, and to see a team working at its peak was a real privilege. However, the real eye-opening moment for me came when I started to connect the dots as to why Tudor chose to partner with VCARB. It was not an accident, it was not out of necessity, and certainly no one was forcing the partnership together. To me, these two are incredibly natural partners who complement and benefit each other equally. And that is a real rarity when it comes to partnerships in today’s watch world.