Heuer Autavia "Viceroy"

The piece
The 1163 is the automatic Autavia, built around the Caliber 12. That is why the crown sits on the left of the case and the pushers on the right. It looks wrong to anyone raised on modern chronographs, and it is the first thing that tells you what is inside.

In 1972 the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company offered this watch as a promotion for Viceroy cigarettes. You mailed in the proofs of purchase from a carton, ten packs, along with eighty eight dollars, and a Swiss automatic chronograph came back. Heuer dealers were asking two hundred for the comparable Autavia in the same months. The offer closed on the thirty first of December and was never run again.

The advertising tells you exactly who it was meant for. It ran in sixteen magazines across that summer. Life, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Field and Stream, Guns and Ammo, Playboy, Car and Driver, Road and Track. There was a version that appeared only in the program for that year's Indianapolis 500. The artwork put the watch alongside the Vel's Parnelli Jones cars, which had taken the previous two 500s with Al Unser driving. This watch was not sold to collectors. It was sold to American men who read magazines in waiting rooms and watched the race in May.

It worked far too well. Heuer could not build them fast enough on Piquerez cases alone and brought in Schmitz as a second supplier partway through, which is why no two Viceroys are quite alike. Cases run to different thicknesses. There are two styles of caseback, shallow and deep. Pusher cutouts open to the front, the back, or both. The parts were interchangeable and the factory used what was on the bench that day.

So the Viceroy is defined by its specification rather than its case. The economy dial, with polished markers on white inserts and all twelve numerals printed on the hour register. Brushed steel hands with red tips, red inserts, and a thin strip of lume. A bi-directional ratcheting tachymeter bezel. The Autavias going out through dealers in the same months had the standard dial, polished hands, and a minute and hour bezel, and cost more than twice as much.

Forty two millimeters across, 47.2 lug to lug, twenty between the lugs. Nothing about it is delicate. It was built to be read at speed and priced to be worn hard, and this one was.

One thing worth saying plainly. Watches identical to this one were sold through dealers both before and after the promotion ran. The Viceroy name describes a configuration, not a receipt. Without the original paperwork nobody can tell you which box this particular watch left in, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.