In the winter of 1997, on an evening in February, two men met near the Duomo in Milan to make a decision. One was Patrizio Bertelli, the chief executive of Prada. The other was German Frers, an Argentine yacht designer who had spent his career drawing the lines of fast boats. By the end of the evening they had decided to challenge for the America's Cup, sailing's oldest trophy. They named the syndicate Luna Rossa. Red Moon. Italian for the thing you stare at across distance and try to reach.
Twenty-two years later, a Swiss watchmaker called Panerai signed on as the team's official sponsor. From that arrangement a small number of objects began to flow out into the world, marked with the Luna Rossa name and the red stripe of the team's livery. The most technically interesting of them, the Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa Titanio, reference PAM01654, costs $16,400. It is limited to 150 pieces. I was on the waitlist for nine months before I got the call.
If you spend any time with this watch, it begins to look like a puzzle.
2.
The puzzle is this. Panerai is not, historically, a sailing brand. Panerai is a frogman brand. The company spent the first half of the twentieth century making instruments for the Royal Italian Navy, and in particular for the men of the Decima Flottiglia MAS, the elite combat divers who attached limpet mines to British battleships in Alexandria harbor in 1941. Almost everything about the Panerai catalogue, the cushion-shaped case, the locking crown bridge, the perforated sandwich dial, the absurdly large luminous numerals you can read at twenty meters of depth, was designed for men working underwater in the dark.
A flyback chronograph is the opposite of that. A flyback is a timing instrument. It exists to measure successive intervals, the legs of a flight, the splits of a race. It was originally developed for pilots who needed to clock one segment, then immediately the next, without losing seconds to the conventional three-step reset. It belongs to the daylight world of fast decisions and visible competitors. It belongs on a deck, not at depth.
So why does this watch exist?
The easy answer is the sponsorship. Panerai writes a check to Luna Rossa, Panerai gets to put the team's name on a watch, the watch sells out, everyone goes home. This is roughly how brand collaborations work. And it is true that the PAM01654 has the red stripe, the gray dial, the "Luna Rossa" inscription on the face. The marketing is doing its work.
But that is not the whole story. The harder answer, the more interesting answer, is that this watch is built like an instrument that someone might actually use. The titanium case is brushed to absorb light rather than reflect it, because glare on the water is an enemy of legibility. The tachymeter scale on the inner flange is calibrated in knots, not miles per hour, because the people timing the legs of an America's Cup race are not driving cars. The flyback function is the thing you reach for when you need to clock the next leg without losing a second. Every piece of the design, when you look at it carefully, is doing a job.
This is the distinction worth holding on to. There are limited-edition watches that are merchandise, and there are limited-edition watches that are instruments dressed in a livery. The PAM01654 is the second kind. Whether anyone will ever actually use it to time the start of a regatta leg is, for our purposes, beside the point. The point is that it could.
3.
I came to Panerai late, after what longtime collectors call the paneristi.com meltdown. An online community can be a double-edged sword for a brand. Think about Star Wars. Think about Star Trek. The most zealous communities can turn on their favorite products during a crisis, and Panerai's flagship forum did exactly that. The successor community has been slow to rebuild. But there is still enough of it left to keep the brand alive, and there is still that origin story, which I think about often. The Florentine workshop. The Royal Italian Navy contracts. The frogmen.
I am a sucker for a good origin story. Panerai's is hard to beat.
I now own six Panerai watches. The PAM01654 is my second from the Luna Rossa partnership. The first was the Submersible QuarantaQuattro Luna Rossa, reference PAM01681, a time-only diver. The two watches share the gray dial and the red accents, but they serve opposite ends of the brand's history. One is for going down. The other is for racing across.
Both of my cars are gray. Apparently I have a thing for gray.
4.
The case is forty-four millimeters across, made of Grade 5 titanium, the same alloy used in aircraft components and high-performance sporting equipment. Titanium weighs about forty-four percent less than steel, and on a watch this size the weight difference is the difference between a piece you forget on your wrist and a piece that announces itself every time you reach for a coffee. The brushed surface kills the glare. The polished bezel adds a thin band of contrast at the edge. Through the sapphire caseback, the limitation number is engraved around the perimeter: this one, of one hundred fifty.
The chronograph pushers sit at eight and ten o'clock, on the left side of the case. This is the wrong side. On every other chronograph in the world, the pushers live on the right, flanking the crown. On a Luminor they cannot, because the right side is occupied by the locking crown bridge.
That bridge is worth pausing on. In 1955, an engineer at Panerai patented a small lever that swings down over the winding crown and locks it in place, compressing an internal gasket to seal the case. They patented it because winding crowns, after repeated use, were the weak point in any water-resistant watch. The lever solved the problem. Seventy years later, the lever is still there. It still solves the problem. And because it is still there, the chronograph pushers had to go somewhere else, which is why this watch has a layout that, the first time you handle it, feels backwards. You learn to use it. After a week the layout feels less like an inconvenience and more like a fingerprint.
The pushers themselves are tipped with red lacquer rings, the first of several places the Luna Rossa livery shows up on the watch. They are subtle. They are the kind of detail you do not notice in a photograph and cannot stop noticing in person.
5.
Inside is the calibre P.9100, Panerai's first in-house automatic chronograph movement, made entirely in the company's facility in Neuchâtel. It runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour, has 302 components and 37 jewels, and stores 72 hours of power reserve in two barrels arranged in series. The Glucydur balance and the Incabloc anti-shock device are standards in serious mechanical watchmaking. The chronograph uses a vertical clutch and a column wheel, which is the nicer of the two ways to build a chronograph and produces both a smoother pusher action and a cleaner start of the seconds hand.
This is, by any reasonable measure, a very good movement.
It is also a movement Panerai was, in a sense, forced to build. For most of the brand's modern history, the company used third-party calibers, often modified, sometimes only lightly. Collectors complained. The complaints had a specific shape. They were not really about the engineering. The watches kept time. They were about the word in-house, which has become, in the last fifteen years, a kind of magic syllable in the watch industry. A buyer at this price point wants to feel the brand made the engine, not just the body. The market punishes brands that do not. So Panerai built a manufacture, and the P.9100 is one of the things the manufacture produces.
This is one of the small, slightly funny truths of the watch industry. Some of the most expensive engineering decisions are not made because they are necessary. They are made because the market has decided what counts as serious.
The flyback function is the chronograph's reason for existing in this configuration, and it is genuinely useful. Press the pusher at eight o'clock while the chronograph is running, and the central hands snap back to zero and immediately begin timing again. One press. Three actions. If you are timing the legs of a regatta, this is the difference between catching the next start cleanly and missing it. Pilots needed it for the same reason. Sailors inherited it.
There is a small surprise on the dial. There appear to be two central seconds hands, which would normally indicate a split-seconds chronograph, the kind of complication that costs an order of magnitude more than this watch does. It is not a split-seconds. The second central hand is not measuring a parallel time. It is the chronograph minutes hand, jumping forward in one-minute increments up to thirty. It looks like one thing. It does another. The first time someone explains it to you, it is genuinely cool.
If there is a complaint here, it is the caseback. Panerai went to the trouble of making the P.9100 in-house and then put a movement behind a sapphire window that is, frankly, unspectacular to look at. The bridges are brushed flat. The decoration is minimal. Compared to what Jaeger-LeCoultre or Bulgari will show you through the back of a watch at this price, the P.9100 looks more functional than ornamental. Panerai is capable of more. The Luminor Perpetual Calendar GMT, which costs about seventy thousand dollars, has a movement that is genuinely beautiful. You only see that level of finishing at very high price points with this brand. That is the trade.
6.
The dial is matte gray, with the sandwich construction Panerai patented decades ago: a lower plate coated in luminous compound, a perforated upper plate that lets the light through the cutouts in the shape of numerals and markers. This is why a Panerai is so legible at night. The luminous material is not painted on top of the dial. It is recessed into a layer beneath. In a dark cabin, on a dark sea, the numerals glow up out of the dial as though they were rising through water, which is more or less the effect the original navy contract was designed to produce.
The chronograph hands are red lacquer, set against the gray. The 12 and 6 are oversized Arabic numerals, in the Panerai house style. The 3 and 9 are also Arabics, smaller. Outside this ring, an inclined inner flange carries a tachymeter scale calibrated in nautical miles. "Luna Rossa" is printed in red below the center of the dial. The two sub-dials, at three and nine o'clock, have a snailed pattern that gives the dial its only ornamental flourish.
The whole thing is balanced. The red accents do most of the work. Without them the dial would be quiet to the point of austere. With them, the watch reads as having a livery, which is the right effect for an object explicitly tied to a racing team.
7.
I have a complaint, and it is the same complaint I have about almost every Panerai I own. The strap is a pain to put on and take off. The PAM01654 ships with a bi-material rubber-and-textile strap carrying the Luna Rossa stripe, plus a secondary all-rubber strap for occasions when the livery feels too loud. Both straps end at a Grade 2 titanium pin buckle. There is no deployant clasp.
If TAG Heuer can build an excellent deployant clasp, and Omega can build an excellent deployant clasp, I do not understand why Panerai cannot. Probably the answer is that the brand is committed to the look of a pin buckle, and the look matters more to the customer than the convenience. Probably the answer is that I am wrong about what the customer wants. But every time I take this watch off, I think about it.
The Barcelona regatta in October 2024 did not go well for Luna Rossa. The team lost to INEOS Britannia, seven races to four, in the Louis Vuitton Cup final, which is the qualifier for the right to challenge for the America's Cup itself. The actual Cup that year went, again, to Emirates Team New Zealand. Luna Rossa goes home, regroups, and returns in 2027, when the 38th America's Cup will be held in Naples, the first time the main event has ever been hosted in Italy.
The watch came out before the result was known. Panerai had no way of seeing the future. And in retrospect, the Barcelona loss does not really change what the PAM01654 is, because the watch is not a victory token. It is an instrument associated with a specific team's pursuit of a specific trophy, in a specific year, and the value of that association does not depend on the outcome. The Cup is the kind of trophy syndicates pursue for decades. Luna Rossa has been in the hunt since 1997. They will be in the hunt in 2027. The watch records a chapter, not an ending.
Here is what I think the Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa Titanio is. It is a watch I am glad I own, that I am not sure I would buy again, that I would not recommend to a casual buyer, and that I will probably defend the next time someone asks me to justify the price.
It scores, in the way that watch reviewers score things, around three and three-quarters out of five. The movement is good. The case is excellent. The dial is striking. It wears thick on the wrist, and the value, against everything else available at sixteen thousand four hundred dollars, is the weakest part of the proposition. There are better-finished movements at lower prices. There are slimmer cases. There are easier straps.
What there is not, anywhere else, is the combination. The frogman brand making the sailing chronograph. The 1955 patent still doing its job seventy years later. The flyback born in airplanes and ended up on yachts. The red moon, named on a winter evening in Milan and still being chased thirty years later. The watch is the sum of all of those things, and the sum is what you are buying.
Whether you will ever use it to time an America's Cup regatta is, as I said, beside the point. The watch carries the accumulated knowledge of Panerai's maritime heritage, from the Florentine workshops supplying the Royal Italian Navy through the partnership with one of competitive sailing's most persistent challengers. That history lives in the object, waiting to tell its story to whoever wears it next.
I would reserve this one for the die-hard Paneristi.
When the Panerai CEO Jean-Marc Pontroue was asked, years ago, how the company had ended up partnered with Luna Rossa specifically, out of all the possible teams in all the possible sports, he gave an answer that has stayed with me. There had been no Plan B, he said. There was one race, the America's Cup, and one team, Luna Rossa.
References
- Panerai. "Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa Titanio PAM01654." Official Product Page, 2024.
- Panerai. "Luna Rossa Partnership." Official Partnership Page, 2024.
- Monochrome Watches. "Panerai Luminor Luna Rossa PAM01653 and Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa PAM01654." 2024.
- Escapement Magazine. "Panerai Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa PAM01654 Watch Review." 2024.
- Element in Time. "Panerai Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa PAM01654." 2024.
- aBlogtoWatch. "New Release: Panerai Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa PAM01654 and Luminor Luna Rossa PAM01653 Watches." 2024.
- Gear Patrol. "Panerai Luminor Chrono Flyback Luna Rossa Titanio." 2024.
