F1's Greatest Driver Wore This Omega Watch For 40 Years, And Maybe If You Were To Wear It You Could Drive Like Him

We're not going to argue about who the greatest Formula One racer of all time is. That debate is settled, and it's obviously the one and only "Chueco" himself, Juan Manuel Fangio (pictured above with his Brazilian counterpart F1 ace Ayrton Senna). With over 46% of championship races he entered having been won by Fangio, nobody will ever deign to take away a record like that. He won five World Championships with four different teams in an era when most drivers were lucky to even survive five seasons. Zero doubt, nobody ever did it like this guy. 

From 1955 onward this Omega Tresor, available at RM Sotheby's Monaco sale in April, lived on the wrist of the F1 great. Fangio was never seen without his trusty gold-bezel white-face timepiece with what I assume was a series of replacement black leather bands. It was a prize for winning the Gran Premio de Venezuela in Caracas in 1955 driving a Maserati. That race was hosted by his home club, so it was probably even more sentimental than any of the GPs he won as a Mercedes factory driver that year en route to his third championship.

RM Sotheby's

The back of the watch is engraved with the words "Joyería Continental a Juan Manuel Fangio Caracas Nov 1955" somewhat proving its authenticity. After so many years of wear and tear, I'm quite surprised by the shape this watch is in. It looks like Fangio cared for this piece quite a lot, and kept it cleaned and tuned up. A nice watch says a lot about its wearer, and while Fangio certainly could have purchased much more expensive watches than this, it meant something to him, and there's no point in having something like this without a great story. 

In "Like Mike," Disney's 2002 hit basketball comedy, Calvin Cambridge, played by a pre-"Fast And Furious: Tokyo Drift" Bow Wow, has a dream to be a famed basketball player. After lacing up a set of sneakers with MJ initials written on the tongue, he rapidly becomes a young NBA wunderkind. The movie posits that by wearing Michael Jordan's old sneaks, Bow Wow soaked up the talent from Mike's leftover foot juju. Might be worth a bid or two on this watch to see if JMF left any of his driving talent in that wrist watch.

I'm not saying that if you were to pay a premium for Juan Manuel Fangio's wristwatch that you'd be suddenly imbued with the talent to take down Max Verstappen in a battle of Formula One supremacy, but you'll never know until you try it. Fangio has been dead for over 30 years, so maybe it fades with time, and you'd only get a second or two quicker at your local karting track. Either way, you'd have a pretty cool watch when it was all over. 

So how much of a premium is the JMF name bringing to this sale? Omega is a solid name for wrist watches, with history delivering watches worn by lunar astronauts and James Bond himself, so it's probably worth a fortune on its own, right? Unfortunately, the Tresor is a pretty common unit, and they tend to trade hands on the collector market for comparatively little. Examples of the same Reference (OT 2865) are available right now on Chrono24 for between $2,300 and $4,200. RM Sotheby's pre-auction estimate on Fangio's watch is between $14,000 and $26,000. 

If you don't get any faster, is it worth an extra twenty grand to say you have Fangio's watch?