Small Brands, Big Sports with an H. Moser & Cie. Formula 1 Experience
Rolex, TAG Heuer, Louis Vuitton, Richard Mille, IWC, Breitling, Tudor…and H. Moser & Cie. One of these watch brands is definitely not like the others in stature, size, modern name recognition, or purchasing power when it comes to buying into large sports sponsorships. So why has H. Moser & Cie. suddenly raced into Formula 1 with an Alpine Racing partnership? A visit to the 2026 British Grand Prix at Silverstone with the Swiss brand clears up this perhaps mystifying question. And we find out that the answer is not so mystifying after all.
It started with an executive manager in the automobile industry, Luca de Meo, who is today the CEO of Kering (former owners of Girard-Perregaux and Ulysse Nardin and current owner of Gucci). In July of 2020, de Meo began as CEO of the Renault Group. He merged Renault Sport and its Formula 1 team with Renault’s high-end brand, Alpine, as part of the effort to turn Renault’s then financial losses into recovery (which he accomplished by the time he left for Kering in June 2025).
H. Moser & Cie.’s outgoing international sales director Nicholas Hoffman (who I have internally christened mayor of Alpine-ville since the Silverstone weekend – he knows everyone!) explained very vividly how the partnership came about.
“How it started is a nice story,” he remembered. “Luca De Meo wanted to elevate the Alpine brand in the luxury segment. He wanted to position the Alpine cars a little higher end, and he wanted to be associated with a higher-segment luxury watch brand. He had shortlisted a few brands because he’s a watch collector himself.” Naturally, H. Moser & Cie. was included on that list. “He asked his team to send out an email, and we received it, I think, on info@, which we thought was spam. And we still answered it. It turned out to be very real.”
H. Moser & Cie.’s youngish CEO Edouard Meylan is never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, and he does love the drama of the unexpected as evidenced by multiple past actions setting the industry ablaze. In addition, it turns out that Edouard’s father, Georges-Henri Meylan, former CEO of Audemars Piguet and today’s chairman of the board of MELB Holding (which owns Moser, Hautlence, escapement/tourbillon specialist Precision Engineering, and a significant stake in complication specialist Agenhor) is a vintage Alpine enthusiast and owns two of these automobiles.
Edouard Meylan and his team inspected the offer carefully in terms of visibility and exposure, including logo placements, but also guest organization and product development. “There were a lot of discussions back and forth, and what we realized is that Alpine is a bit like Moser: it’s kind of the underdog,” Hoffman recalled. “There are a lot of Alpine enthusiasts, just like Moser enthusiasts, and everything just kind of clicked together with our teams.”
H. Moser & Cie. officially joined forces with Alpine Motorsports in February 2024 in an agreement as its first global partner spanning all of Alpine’s programs, including the F1 team, endurance racing, and the Alpine Academy.
“We highly appreciate the fact that it’s more than just a contractual partnership. It’s really… we have common values. There is a common identity of wanting to talk about yourself in a legit, authentic way. And you see everybody here is like that. You’re sharing those values, which maybe not every leading brand can’t or doesn’t have the luxury anymore to do because they’re too big and they have rules,” Hoffman explained.
And there is, of course, the question of money. Some of the sums that float around F1 have been disclosed over the years – such as the 10-year, $1 billion global deal that Louis Vuitton’s parent company LVMH made with Formula 1, beginning in 2025 and spanning multiple group-owned brands.
So, to put it bluntly, how does a smaller luxury brand like Moser afford what is certainly an enormous – or even potentially dangerous-for-survival – sum of money? “To be frank, Alpine was not right at the top…it was good [for us]. We wouldn’t do something if it was out of our league in terms of budget,” Hoffman pointed out. In 2025, Alpine came in at number 10 (out of 10), and in both 2023’s and 2024’s World Constructors Championship standings Alpine ended the season in sixth place.
“Even in back in 2010 when I joined Moser, we wanted to be niche but not niche niche. What we meant by that was, you’ve got a few hundred-watches-a-year brands, and we’re already bigger than them,” Hoffman said, no doubt alluding to the reported 3,500 watches per year that H. Moser & Cie. currently manufactures. “And back then we wanted to be maybe the biggest of the smallest, and now it’s kind of we want to be the smallest of the biggest. We have that ambition of continuing to grow, and if we want that, we kind of need to do something to have the credibility.”
How Alpine has influenced the watches of H. Moser & Cie.
Edouard Meylan is on record saying that the Alpine partnership has led them to think about edgier, less classic developments. For his part, Hoffman took pride in showing and explaining the Alpine-inspired watches that Moser initially developed for the partnership, the Streamliner Drivers and Mechanics watches in blue and pink.
In 2025, two H. Moser & Cie. watches were introduced to celebrate the Alpine team in its livery colours. The Streamliner Alpine Drivers and Mechanics Editions are also available to the general public in a limited edition of 200 pieces. The Streamliner Alpine Drivers is powered by Moser’s first skeletonized flyback chronograph movement, Caliber HMC 700, made in conjunction with Agenhor and using the AgenGraphe chronograph movement as its base. Due to the minimalist bent of this line and the setup of the AgenGraphe/Streamliner, the chrono has no subdials (which would be nearly impossible to see anyway thanks to the skeletonized backdrop); the stopped time is read in minutes and seconds using the hands.
The Streamliner Alpine Mechanics Edition was created with the team behind the drivers in mind. It is in essence a quartz-driven watch showing minutes and seconds in analogue fashion in an off-centre subdial, but with a digital module made according to H. Moser & Cie. and Alpine’s needs to show team and race specifics important for these unsung heroes as they work. The digital screen is off until a button press turns on a choice of functions: GMT with country selector, split-seconds chronograph, perpetual calendar, and F1 mode.
In the 200-piece edition for the public, the two watches housed in 42.3 mm stainless steel Moser cases and coming on rubber straps in the team’s colours are sold only as a set. The 2025 Drivers Edition case is a striking blue PVD. While the 2025 edition used blue as its main accent colour, the 2026 edition utilizes pink, and here the Drivers Edition case is matte stainless steel (and not PVD pink!).
If you’re wondering whether the Alpine team really wears the watches, I can attest that I saw many Streamliner Alpine Mechanics watches on the wrists of Alpine team members as they worked during my time at Silverstone. It is after all made specifically with these people in mind.
“They have all the information they need,” said Hoffman. “There’s a very strict timekeeping process at F1. They’ve sometimes only got 60 minutes to work on the car, not one minute more, for example. And so with their engineers and our engineers we identified what information they needed. They can sync the F1 team mode and it goes into lock mode, and that is meant for the team engineer to push information to the whole team’s watches using Bluetooth with beacons. That was created with Moser’s engineers and Alpine’s engineers.”
During my day test driving the Streamliner Alpine Mechanics watch, I did not receive any F1 team messages. But wearing it definitely made me feel like part of the team. Yes, Moser has since released a skeletonised ceramic Streamliner Alpine edition, more along the lines of what we’ve come to expect from racing collaborations. But when it comes to eloquently explaining why the partnership works, the Streamliner Alpine Mechanics watch is in pole position.
