Hands-On: The Montblanc Timewalker Rally Timer 100 (And HODINKEE At The Copperstate 1000 Rally)

By Jack Forster

” width=”540″/>

As you might have noticed, this week HODINKEE is at the annual Copperstate 1000 vintage car rally in Arizona, and it seems like a great time to look at one of the most interesting new rally timers. The Montblanc Timewalker Rally Timer 100 is, as we noted when it was first announced, a modern re-interpretation of a vintage rally timer in the Minerva archives. Minerva is a famous name among vintage watch enthusiasts – the company was originally founded as H. C. Robert, in 1858, in Villeret, and “Minerva” started out as a sub-brand. Eventually, the company became Minerva SA, Villeret, in 1929, having gradually shifted from its beginnings as an établisseur (a company that buys and cases supplied movements) to a designer and manufacturer of movements in its own right.

Minerva was one of many companies nearly snowed under by the blizzard of increasingly inexpensive quartz watches that started to come on the market in the 1970s, and the Frey family – the last family owners of Minerva – eventually sold the business to an Italian investor named Emilio Gnutti, in 2000, who brought in a new technical team. The new owners, however, seemed to struggle to successfully bring Minerva into the spotlight for modern watch enthusiasts, and in 2006, Minerva was acquired by the Richemont Group for Montblanc, which already had a significant manufacturing capacity in nearby Le Locle. Along with manufacturing capability, came a portfolio of watch and chronograph movements, modernized variations of which Montblanc has introduced since 2006 in its Villeret collection.

The Minerva name is still alive in the term Montblanc uses for its movement development and research division in Villeret – the Institut Minerva de Recherche en Haute Horlogerie – and the factory itself is now simply referred to as the Montblanc Manufacture in Villeret.

Minerva, as we’ve mentioned, produced many dashboard instruments for use in motorsports, and particularly for rallying, but what exactly is rallying and why is keeping track of time in the car so important? Rallying, unlike other forms of racing, doesn’t take place on a circuit. Instead, rally drivers travel from checkpoint to checkpoint, often on public roads (which may or may not be closed to regular traffic). Rallying goes back to the very early 20th century, but …read more