Vacheron Constantin has added an ultra-elegant piece to its Traditionnelle collection for 2020. Debuting at the Watches & Wonders Geneva 2020 exhibition that’s taken to the virtual world because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new Traditionnelle Tourbillon Chronograph is a creation spawning from a special project out of Vacheron Constantin’s Grand Complications department. It’s for the time the Swiss brand has combined a tourbillon and a chronograph function on a timepiece, which makes it that much more special. The case measures 42.5mm wide and 11.7mm thick and is made of 5N red gold, which houses in-house-made Vacheron Constantin caliber 3200 — a Seal of Geneva-certified mechanism. The manually wound movement beats at a relatively slow 2.5Hz and offers a power reserve of 65 hours. Each of the 292 components that are hand-decorated and hand-assembled can be seen from the caseback.
The position of the wide tourbillon aperture at twelve o’clock is also uncommon for Vacheron Constantin. Intersecting it is the slightly sunken sub-dial for the chronograph at three o’clock. The monopusher chronograph measures up to 45 minutes and features an all-or-nothing activator to prevent accidental presses or damage to the movement. The power reserve indicator has its sub-dial at six o’clock, denoting how much power is left before it needs to be wound. The outer edge of the dial gets both a railway-style minute scale and a traditional but subtle tachymeter scale. Finishing off the elegant dial are the brand-style dauphine hands and matching applied pink gold hour markers. The Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Tourbillon Chronograph reference 5100T/000R-B623 is priced at $197,000 USD.
