Jacob & Co. Fast & Furious Twin Turbo

I like tacky watches. Mind you, I don’t like Richard Mille watches. They’re not tacky. They’re ugly and pretentious. Expensive too. While the Jacob & Co. Fast & Furious Twin Turbo is plenty pricey, it’s wonderfully, gloriously, unabashedly tacky. Tasteless? Some might say so. People who fail to appreciate the artistic genre known as kitsch, best defined by Jeff Koons’ stainless steel faceless space bunny “balloon.” Entitled Rabbit, it sold for . . .

Ninety-one-point-one million dollars. Which makes the $580k Jacob & Co. Fast & Furious Twin Turbo something of a bargain.

Unlike Koon’s highly reflective Bunny, the two-tone watch is completely ridiculous. A $600k watch with two triple-axis tourbillons commemorating a movie that couldn’t be more mass market if it tried (and boy does it try). Not to mention the TT’s decimal repeater – a “feature” that rivals those spinny things for The Most Useless Horological Complication Ever Invented award. wikipedia.org:

[A decimal repeater] sounds the number of ten-minute intervals after the last hour and then the minutes. For example, if the time is 2:49 then the decimal repeater will sound 2 low tones representing 2 hours, 4 sequence tones representing 40 minutes, and 9 high tones representing 9 minutes: “dong, dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding”. These repeaters, although first made more than 250 years ago, are very rare. 

Thanks to Jacob &  Co.’s [Chinese?] artisans, there will be nine more of them; the number of Fast & Furious Twin Turbos set to be unleashed upon the world, starter girl-obscuring hands be damned.

Fans of the Fast & Furious franchise – now up to episode 9 – will recognize the vehicles on the dial as Dominique Toretto’s Charger and Brian O’Conner’s Toyota Supra. They’re really loud and exceptionally fast. Which makes the decimal repeater’s languid and dulcet tones even funnier.

Judging from the presser, Jacob & Co. CEO Benjamin Arabov doesn’t share my bemusement.

“Jacob & Co. has been in many important and successful partnerships,” he claims, “but we have never partnered with an entity that so closely fits our DNA. The new Fast & Furious Twin Turbo Furious watches are going to be awesome.”

That’s a ballsy statement for a man pimping a watch that’s nothing more than a redecorated version of their Bugatti Twin Turbo Furious. (Yup. Furious.)

Besides, Jacob & Co.’s gloriously hideous 49mm Opera Godfather Minute Repeater is, was and always will be the “natural fit” between the watchmaker and a co-branding partner. Never mind the discordant top note played by the behemoth’s music box (click here for video). We’re talking about a Manhattan jeweler whose big break arrived via rapper Notorious B.I.G.

There’s a small but sure-fire market for the Jacob & Co. Fast & Furious Twin Turbo. Vin Diesel received $20m for F9 and a cut of the profits. Add that to previous payments and a $580k watch is back of the sofa money for the man born Mark Sinclair.

If they haven’t pissed away their fortunes on real estate, same goes for F9 director Justin Lin, producer Neal H. Moritz and actors John Cena, Charlize Theron, Kurt Russell, Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell and Michelle Rodriguez.

We’re only one watch shy of maxing-out the nine watch run! I’m sure there are a few well-heeled F&F fans on the other side of the Pacific itching to strap this bad boy on their wrist (hoping they don’t run into each other).

The funny thing is, the Jacob & Co. Fast & Furious Twin Turbo is exactly the kind of watch you’d never see in the movie (even though it’s a chronograph). I reckon that’s a feature not a bug. You?