Hanhart has made the first official edition of the 417 ES to bear Steve McQueen’s name and signature, developed with the actor’s grandchildren, Chase and Madison McQueen, and limited to 300 pieces worldwide. The 417 ES Steve McQueen Limited Edition No. 1 lists at €2,890 including German VAT, or $3,570 in the United States through distributor WatchBuys. The brand’s own store page showed the piece as out of stock at the time of writing, which says something about the appetite.
The watch itself is a study in restraint with one loud detail. The 39 mm stainless steel case is 13.3 mm thick and 46 mm from lug to lug, with a fluted bidirectional bezel carrying a red insert and the signature red HyCeram reset pusher at 4 o’clock. A domed sapphire crystal covers the dial, and the screw-down crown takes water resistance to 100 metres. The dial is matte black: the historic Hanhart logo, Arabic numerals and hands in Super-LumiNova “Light Old Radium,” running seconds at 9 and a 30-minute counter at 3, and McQueen’s signature printed small above 6 o’clock. The curved hand tips are a period-correct touch meant to reduce parallax.
The dial reads as a direct descendant of the pilot’s chronographs of the 1950s: the fluted bidirectional bezel, the red-marked insert, the small running seconds and 30-minute counter in a strict bi-compax layout. Super-LumiNova “Light Old Radium” gives the Arabic numerals their aged warmth without the radioactivity of the original lume. The signature, small above 6 o’clock, is the only element the originals never carried.
The movement is the hand-wound Sellita AMT5100 M, built on the SW510 M, itself descended from the Valjoux 7750 lineage, and assembled by Sellita’s high-end AMT department. It brings a column wheel, a flyback function and hacking seconds, runs at 4 Hz with a 58-hour power reserve, and is regulated in-house in Gütenbach to 0/+8 seconds per day across six positions, a standard that deliberately prefers a slight gain over the COSC band of -4/+6.
Turn the watch over and the edition’s personality shows through the first exhibition caseback on a 39 mm 417 ES. The screw-on ring is etched with “Steve McQueen,” “King of Cool” and the edition number. Hanhart’s own press images are honest about the stage of the project: the display ring in the brand’s photography is engraved “Prototype.”
The presentation matches the theatre of the thing. The watch arrives on a dark brown Shell Cordovan cuff strap from the Italian tannery Comipel, vegetable-tanned, with the historical-logo pin buckle; the 20 mm lug width takes the rest of the 417 ES strap range and Hanhart’s steel bracelet. The box holds a booklet, a numbered plaque and a limitation card modeled on McQueen’s 1964 racing licence, designed and signed by Chase and Madison McQueen, who proposed the edition and approved the use of the signature. There is also a bottle of red nail polish, a nod to the red pusher.
The 417 ES was created in the mid-1950s as a pilot’s chronograph for the German Bundeswehr; the ES stands for Edelstahl, stainless steel. These were issued tool watches, worn hard by the pilots who were given them, and the surviving originals are among the most collectible German chronographs of the postwar era. That military pedigree is what McQueen bought into, knowingly or not, when he chose the watch.
McQueen’s connection to it runs through the 1964 International Six Days Trial in Erfurt, where he raced under the alias “Harvey Mushman” to evade his film producers’ ban on motorcycle racing, his personal 417 ES on his wrist in the period photographs. The alias is one of the great anecdotes of his racing years; the watch in the photographs is the document. This is the bridge that makes an official edition credible: the 417 ES was on McQueen’s wrist before the legend needed it to be.
The “first official” in the name carries weight. Watchmaking has traded on the McQueen name for decades, from the Monaco he wore on screen to the countless unofficial associations, but an edition with the family’s sign-off is a different thing. Chase and Madison McQueen proposed the edition and approved the use of the signature, and the limitation card in the box, modeled on McQueen’s 1964 racing licence, was designed and signed by them. That lineage of permission is the edition’s real certificate.
The red pusher carries its own legend: a pilot’s girlfriend painted the reset button red so he would come home unharmed, the story goes, while the practical purpose was to stop accidental resets mid-timing. Hanhart states plainly that it did not embellish the story. Roughly €500 separates the edition from the regular-production equivalent, which makes the McQueen premium read as restraint rather than rent-seeking.
We have not handled the watch; this is from the brand’s published specifications and press photography. As celebrity editions go, the ingredients are unusually honest: a real historical connection, family sign-off, and a watch that would be interesting without the signature. Whether 300 pieces is enough for the demand, the brand’s own sold-out listing suggests not.
