Carroll Shelby celebrated by Bulova with Chronograph in classic colour scheme

Although Bulova has been owned by the Japanese watch giant Citizen since 2008, it has its roots in the US where Czech-born Joseph Bulova opened a small jewellery store in New York 150 years ago, achieving sufficient success to be able to establish a factory in Switzerland to make watch movements that he then cased-up back in America.

Bulova’s assistant, John A Ballard, brought the company into the public eye with a remarkable gift for marketing that, in 1926, resulted in Bulova watches being advertised through the first ever nationwide US radio commercial.

In 1941 the firm went one better by booking the world’s first television commercial, which aired during a major baseball game and featured a watch dial over a map of the US captioned “America runs on Bulova time…”

By 1959 Bulova had become such a part of American life that electronic technology developed for the ground-breaking Accutron watch it went on to launch the following year was adopted by NASA for its Explore VI satellite.

Bulova went on to play an active part in the NASA space programme, with astronaut Colonel Dave Scott even wearing a Bulova chronograph for his Apollo 15 moon walk in 1971. A decade ago, the watch sold at auction for £1m.

And now Bulova’s ties with the US have been reinforced with the release of a new watch to mark the brand’s 150th anniversary – the Bulova Shelby Racer Chronograph.

Created in collaboration with Carroll Shelby Licensing, the 43mm bullhead chronograph echoes the signature blue and white colour scheme made famous by the celebrated Texan race driver and tuner’s competition cars and features his famous ‘rising cobra’ icon at the three o’clock position.

An engraved scale on the outer bezel ring facilitates speed and distance calculations and can be used in conjunction with the chronograph mechanism that’s powered by Bulova’s Precisionist quartz movement which can time down to 1/1000th of a second and is claimed to be accurate to just plus or minus 10 seconds per year.

That makes the mechanism among the most precise timekeeping devices on the market and the secret of that laser-like accuracy lies in its unique-to-the brand, three-prong quartz crystal which vibrates at a frequency of 262kHZ, eight times greater than the speed of a standard quartz movement.

Being made in a ‘limited edition’ of 7500 examples, each Bulova Shelby Racer Chronograph has a numbered caseback carrying Carroll Shelby’s signature, complete with a suitably liveried 1:24-scale 1967 Shelby GT500 Mustang.

Bulova Shelby Racer Chronograph, £995. uk.bulova.com