For about the first two years, this website had a page called “Associated Brands”. It served as a catch-all for edge cases that were too compelling to ignore. The original description started out with this:
A number of watch brands fall just short of producing officially licensed timepieces, but have made meaningful contributions to Grand Prix racing in some way and deserve an honorable mention here.
Yikes.
I did eventually nuke this well-meaning but misguided category, but it wasn’t the clean solution I was hoping for. Now the balance had tipped in the opposite direction: Instead of obvious scope creep, now the history felt incomplete. To state the obvious, the edge cases were edge cases for a reason.
Even now it feels strange for these brand pages to be absent. REC Watches released a timepiece that contained material from a Lotus 98T chassis. Through an Italian jeweler, Zenith was one of the brands that bore a Ferrari logo in the 1950s, long before the modern era of commercial agreements. Duckworth Prestex handled a private commission from the McLaren Formula 1 team.
On second thought, maybe that last one should be canonical. Hmm…
Or sometimes there IS a clear commercial agreement in place, but the involvement of a racing entity is opaque. Bulgari has made watches with Ducati, but does that include Ducati Corse in the context of MotoGP? It seems like a simple question, but the reality is not as straightforward.
Another common case involved official partnership with a support class team or racer in the Grand Prix paddock. So close, yet so far. The fact that Invicta currently owns an F2 team was pretty difficult to ignore, as is Rochet which made Tech3 team watches specifically for its Moto2 squad.
And this is how the Research Notes section was born. It’s a new home to talk about these edge cases, as well as a place to document various research misadventures, dead ends, and the occasional triumph.
In other words, “Associated Brands” never went away.