Description
IWC has returned as official timing partner of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship for a sixth consecutive year, and has marked it with a new reference in the Pilot's Watch Chronograph 43: the IW378008, an olive green dial with gold-plated hands. It joins the permanent collection at EUR 9,700.
Green is not new to the Pilot's line — there has been a 41mm green chronograph, a Racing Green Edition, a green Big Pilot 43 — but this particular shade is. It is a warmer, more yellow-leaning olive than IWC has used before, and the gold plating on the hands is the first time the brand has paired the colour with a precious-metal tone rather than steel or black.
The association is, admittedly, a stretch: a pilot's chronograph marking a golf tournament in St Andrews. What is not a stretch is the watch itself, which is the full-size 43mm Pilot's Chronograph on the manufacture calibre 69385, delivered on a five-link bracelet with an olive rubber strap in the box.
Design
Nothing structural has changed. The case remains 43mm of brushed and polished stainless steel, 14.8mm thick, with a screw-in crown, a double-domed anti-reflective sapphire crystal and a sapphire display back — an almost-oversized watch by current standards, and one of the last mainstream chronographs that still wears like a proper instrument.
The new element is the dial: olive green with a sunray brush, carrying the classic Pilot's layout of a tri-compax chronograph with day-and-date at three o'clock. All printed markers, numerals and tracks are white and filled with Super-LumiNova; the hands are gold-plated and lume-filled, which is where the whole watch turns. Against the warm olive, the gold reads as period aviation instrumentation rather than dress-watch flash. Through the back sits the calibre 69385, decorated with perlage and circular Geneva stripes under an openworked rotor. It ships on IWC's five-link steel bracelet with a folding clasp, plus an olive green rubber strap, both swappable without tools via the EasX-CHANGE system.
Specifications
- Reference: IW378008
- Case diameter: 43mm
- Case thickness: 14.8mm
- Case material: stainless steel, brushed and polished
- Crystal: convex sapphire with anti-reflective coating on both sides
- Caseback: sapphire display back
- Crown: screw-in
- Water resistance: 100m (10 bar)
- Dial: olive green with sunray brushed finish; white printed markers, numerals and tracks with white Super-LumiNova; gold-plated hands with Super-LumiNova
- Movement: IWC manufacture calibre 69385 (ValFleurier base developed for IWC, derived from the Valjoux 7750)
- Winding: automatic
- Complications: column-wheel chronograph with hours, minutes and seconds; day and date; small hacking seconds
- Jewels: 33
- Frequency: 28,800vph (4Hz)
- Power reserve: 46 hours
- Bracelet/strap: five-link stainless steel bracelet with folding clasp, plus olive green rubber strap; EasX-CHANGE quick-change system
- Limited edition: no — permanent collection
- Price: EUR 9,700
What's Exciting
The calibre 69385 is the quiet argument for this watch. IWC spent years fitting modified Valjoux 7750s into the Pilot's Chronograph, and the 69000 family — developed with Richemont's ValFleurier facility — replaced the cam-switched 7750 architecture with a column wheel and a bidirectional pawl-winding system. It is still 7750-derived in its bones, and the 46-hour reserve is modest next to the 60-plus hours now common, but it is a genuinely more refined chronograph to operate, and the sapphire back finally makes the case for showing it.
The dial is the better story, though. Olive green with gold hands is a combination that almost no one in the sports-chronograph segment is running, and it solves a problem the Pilot's line has had for a decade: how to make a 43mm military-derived chronograph feel like something other than a tool. The gold plating is warm enough to dress the watch up without tipping into two-tone, and because the dial is sunray rather than matte, the olive shifts considerably in the light. Whether golf is the right hook for it is beside the point — it is the most interesting dial IWC has put on this reference.
History
IWC Schaffhausen was founded in 1868 by the American watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones, and built its first pilot's watch, the Special Watch for Pilots, in 1936. The Pilot's Chronograph as a distinct model dates to 1994, when IWC introduced a 39mm automatic chronograph that established the layout still in use: tri-compax registers, day-and-date at three, soft-iron inner case for antimagnetism.
The partnership being marked here is more recent. The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship has been played at St Andrews, Carnoustie and Kingsbarns since 2001, combining a DP World Tour professional event with a pro-am Team Championship. IWC has been its official timing partner since 2021, and has marked previous editions with Portugieser and Pilot's references — making the IW378008 the sixth in a sequence that has become one of the brand's longer-running sporting associations outside motorsport.
