Steve McQueen’s Heuer Monaco Just Sold for $1.4 Million, Leading a Mega Auction Season

During a live watch auction, hardly a moment passes without a dealer or auction specialist rushing out of the room to take a call with the hurried importance typically reserved for the president taking calls from the Situation Room.

While watch auctions are mostly spectator sport for lookie-loos like me, bidding on Steve McQueen’s vintage Heuer Monaco—the avant-garde rectangular watch you may have seen in that photo of the King of Cool zipping up his racing suit in Le Mans—turned even the most flush dealers into onlookers.

Jonny Fowle auctioneering Sotheby's Important Watches auction in New York Courtesy of Sotheby's

Bidding for the Monaco, one of the top lots during this past weekend’s New York auctions, was achingly slow. An online bid beat out an absentee (pre-auction) bid of a million dollars in the final moments, all while the eyes of those of us in the room anxiously darted around. Because when the TAG Heuer Museum already owns two McQueen Monacos and another couple sit in the hands of a private collection, there are only so many people left who are ready to spend a million bucks on a Monaco.

Eventually, the McQueen Monaco sold for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s, still managing to zoom past its $500,000–$1 million estimate.

In New York, the three big old-school auction houses hosted their watch sales over four days. A few times a year, dealers and collectors gather in the world’s few horological hubs—Geneva, New York, and Hong Kong—and in the blink of an eye, nearly $100 million worth of watches can change hands. Or at least, the total’s that high when the watches are good and Bitcoin’s flirting with $100,000.

I spent a few days zipping around town to attend the previews, auctions, and catch a little gossip from dealers, specialists, and collectors. This time around, more than $50 million worth of watches sold at Sotheby’s ($16.6 million), Phillips ($30.3 million), and Christie’s ($10.9 million), with another few million still to close under their online hammers.

The vibe is notably more subdued and cautious than in 2021 when I attended my first big auction during those frothy, pandemic-adjacent days. You remember when a Charizard card cost as much as a Rolex Daytona and a Daytona was as much as a Ford Bronco, and a Ford Bronco—well, you get it.

At those sales in 2021, a modern Patek Philippe Nautilus sold for $6.5 million simply because it had a bright Tiffany & Co. blue dial—a watch that sells for “just” a million bucks nowadays, give or take. I vividly remember rapper Rich the Kid posing for photos next to the robin's-egg-blue Nautilus. Multiple kids from the house Arnault attended that week.

This year, the closest thing to a celebrity sighting was Bev Weston, who could be spotted sitting quietly in the corner of the Sotheby’s preview. While hardly a household name, Weston was responsible for perhaps the biggest lot of the week, or at least the most famous one: the latest Steve McQueen Heuer Monaco that the actor wore on set while filming Le Mans.

It’s the type of celebrity co-sign a brand would pay millions for today—in the case of TAG Heuer (and its parent LVMH), it is spending $150 million a year to sponsor Formula 1. But in the 1970s, Heuer and auto racing were sine qua non.

Weston worked as a mechanic on the set of Le Mans. After filming wrapped, he wandered into the prop department’s tent to buy some used overalls. While there, he also spotted a blue Monaco on a metal bracelet. The price? Forty dollars. Weston added it to his haul and wore the Monaco for the next few decades before selling it in 2010.

In all, six Heuer Monacos were used as props in the filming of Le Mans; it might be the most important Heuer, pulling together racing, chronographs, and one of Hollywood’s leading men into one watch. Before last weekend, the most recent of the “McQueen Monacos” to appear publicly sold at Phillips for $2.2 million in 2020.

Steve McQueen's Monaco Tony Traina

The $1.4 million result for McQueen’s Monaco led strong results for the “Heuer Champions” portion of the Sotheby’s sale, a subsection of nearly 40 vintage Heuers, many with direct ties to motorsports. “We’re really focusing on watches that have stories, narrative, and presenting them in an auction setting that’s fun,” said Geoff Hess, the global head of watches at Sotheby's.

This emphasis on stories can belie the fact that watches are serious money nowadays. As collectibles, they’re at an interesting crossroads. Not as valuable as art or even cars, but more serious than, say, coins or paperweights.

In those heady days of 2021, speculators looked for any reason to buy a watch. Bright blue dial! Limited edition! Comes with an NFT! The biggest difference is that in 2024 buyers look for any reason not to buy a watch. Throughout the weekend, I sat with dealers and collectors as they picked up and carefully considered rare vintage Rolex watches, Pateks, and more. The list of flaws that might remove a lot from bidding consideration is long.

At the Sotheby’s preview, I watched Genevese dealer Sacha Davidoff as he filled out condition notes in his own spreadsheet. Next to Lot 199: Rolex Daytona Reference 6240, he simply typed “Meh.”

The meh started with the vintage Daytona’s noticeably worn acrylic bezel. The dial was also missing a luminous plot at 3 o’clock. The original crown had also been replaced during a service. Sure, it’s still a vintage Daytona, but these seemingly small details mean everything to collectors. Compare this Daytona to some of the other watches in the sale and you immediately get it. Meh.

The “meh” Daytona Tony Traina

Davidoff's spreadsheet Tony Traina

The market was in agreement with Davidoff. The next day, this particular Daytona failed to sell, not receiving a bid above its $50,000 low auction estimate.

Just a couple of hours later, I sat with a few collectors as they ogled the condition of a vintage “Paul Newman” Daytona at Christie’s, this one the same reference 6239 that Newman himself wore. The clean white dial, with all its original lume plots, and “strong” case—collector-speak for a case that’s been only lightly polished and maintains its original lines and brushing—had them drooling.

This Paul Newman Daytona sold for $453,000. It’s not the supercharged days of 2017 in the wake of Newman’s Newman selling for $17.7 million, but it’s a strong result for an excellent Daytona.

Meanwhile, the love for Cartier also continued unabated across the New York sales, with strong results for everything from an oblong Tank from the swinging ’60s and Cartier London ($152,400) to the more modern and steampunk Tank Guichet ($177,800) and even to a number of Cartier clocks.

These examples illustrate the growing gulf between the truly great and the merely meh.

Down the street, Phillips’s New York Watch Auction: XI was also headlined by the truly great, this time from independent master watchmaker Philippe Dufour. One of his eight grande and petite sonnerie wristwatches sold for $3.7 million. It’s an incredibly complex watch that chimes different hour intervals depending on what mode its wearer has selected, a smartwatch before the wrist computer was a figment of Steve Jobs’s imagination.

While condition and provenance are the most important considerations for vintage watches, certain independent watchmakers, such as Dufour, have come to be viewed as living artists, and their works are increasingly valued accordingly. Part of this is thanks to the efforts of savvy auctioneers like Hess and his former boss and current rival Aurel Bacs, the senior consultant at Phillips in association with Bacs & Russo, who have repositioned watches as tiny works of art, expressions of their maker, and inherently more valuable than the mass-produced stuff you might find a few blocks over on Fifth Avenue.

After all, Sotheby’s is also the place where a banana sold for $6.2 million just a couple of weeks ago. To be clear, watches like the Dufour often have more in common with that expensive banana than with a pre-owned Breitling.

But it’s not all multimillion-dollar mechanical art or McQueen Monacos at these sales. Each auction has also placed an increased emphasis on the budding generation of young watch buyers.

“One thing we’re definitely seeing is a meaningful shift across generations,” Hess said. “One-third of our buyers in the past year have been Gen Z or millennials.” Hess said this context has pushed him and his team to offer watches across price points. Over at Phillips, 69% of its lots were won by online bidders.

At Phillips, this emphasis on accessible prices was also on display in the TimeForArt auction, the second installment of the charity sale with proceeds benefiting the Swiss Institute. The lineup saw 25 pieces donated from established brands like Chopard and Chanel to upstarts like Furlan Marri, Anoma, and Baltic. The latter group makes accessible, design-driven watches, often for about $1,000. Their unique pieces crafted for the charitable cause sold for multiples of that.

While the McQueen Monaco or Dufour sonnerie were always going to make a spectator out of all but the most privileged collectors, the anxious moments of bidding once the Monaco hit the block felt emblematic of the entire market.

Some are ready to raise the paddle, especially for watches in truly great condition or with special provenance. But many are acting like students who forgot to do the homework, eyes darting across the room, trying to figure out what’s next for the watch market, and wondering if anyone’s got the answers.

It might not be as exciting, but it no doubt means the market’s in a healthier place than the brief moment when a celebrity sighting seemed as common as a vintage Daytona at a watch auction.