It was the car in which Scheufele drove his first-ever Mille Miglia back in 1989, accompanied by motorsport legend and family friend, Mr Jacky Ickx.

“We have since driven the route together many more times,” he says. “But while I always feel a certain level of apprehension before the start of every Mille Miglia, being beside a six-times Le Mans winner whose Formula 1 career saw him take to the podium 25 times always boosts my confidence.”

His start-ramp jitters on Brescia’s historic Viale Venezia are forgivable. Despite the massive expansion of Italy’s autostrada over the past century, the route of the Mille Miglia has remained close to that of the original course plotted in 1927 by the Brescia Automobile Club. The same course that, just two years after Britain’s Sir Stirling Moss set the record at 10 non-stop hours at 98mph, was cancelled following the death of 11th Marquess of Portago, Alfonso de Portago, his navigator and nine spectators, after one of the tyres on his Ferrari 335 S exploded.

Reinstated in 1977, only period-correct, pre-1957 sports cars can now enter. A collective pricelessness of mid-century Astons, Alfas, Bentleys, Bugattis, Ferraris and Porsches that are still, nonetheless, driven hard. Encouraged to do so, in fact, by the Carabinieri themselves, waving you through red lights with gusto. And it’s with this passion – the passion for performance engineering that forges such a bond between cars and watches, let alone Scheufele’s fandom – that Chopard retro-styles its chronographs so perfectly you can practically smell the Connolly leather upholstery and hot oil.

However, no choke required nowadays. Pop the hood – or rather, turn over your watch – and you’ll see how fine-tuned the stopwatch mechanics of the Mille Miglia Classic Chronograph are through the crystal caseback, ticking within the COSC-certified chronometer tolerance of –4 and +6 seconds per day. Updated for 2023, the collection now includes vibrant dials in burgundy and pistachio-green, as well as all-purpose black. Cased in Chopard’s own Lucent Steel – a harder, shinier, part-recycled alloy – the new generation comes on faux-aged leather straps for that vintage feel.

Watches, cars and the racy chronograph in particular is a cult that’ll never lose its potency, even in our burgeoning era of electric driving. It all arguably stems from another horological icon that turned 60 this year, TAG Heuer’s Carrera.

Launched back in 1963, Heuer had cornered bragging rights as go-to wristwear for every pitlane pilot, thanks to then-CEO Mr Jack Heuer’s canny hustle with F1’s Mr Jo Siffert, securing the endorsement of a certain blue-eyed Mr McQueen, not to mention real-estate placement on Scuderia fuselages throughout the 1970s.

Heuer’s Carrera purified the ultra-legible design codes of the chronograph brand’s 1962 Autavia, meaning the “form follows function” instrumental intention has translated effortlessly into a collection that remains all-embracing. Proved unequivocally by La Chaux-de-Fonds HQ’s officialised Mayfair custom shop, Bamford Watch Department and its new all-gold TAG Heuer Carrera, co-created not in tribute to Red Bull Racing F1, but instead with equal aplomb alongside Mr Wes Lang, who deftly blends the automotive vibe with the LA artist’s distinctive, Americana-infused aesthetic.

The fashion-forwardness of Sir Lewis Hamilton means that Red Bull’s pit neighbour, Mercedes-AMG Petronas has its own Swiss watch partner in IWC Schaffhausen, whose Pilot’s Watch chronograph arguably seems more at home on tarmac than at altitude, especially picked out in fluoro-green accents. A newfound love of all things terrestrial is seen at Oxfordshire’s Bremont, too, where the British watchmaking upstart not only balances its military-aviator origins with a newfound affinity for motorsport, but fosters an affinity with Williams F1 just up the road.

It was almost 100 years ago, in 1925, that Swiss watchmaker Mido spied an opportunity as the automotive market began to flourish. Now part of the vast Swatch Group and based in the city of Le Locle, Mido cleverly produced watches in the shape of distinctive radiator grilles of brands such as Buick, Fiat, Ford, Excelsior and, crucially, Bugatti, so that a new generation of petrolheads were able to fly the flag wherever they couldn’t take their four wheels, or slap a garishly branded key fob onto a boardroom table.

Ninety Bugatti watches were commissioned by Ettore Bugatti himself and given as gifts to his racing drivers – including the new car’s namesake, Mr Louis Chiron – and only 10 are known to have survived. The incumbent watchmaker for Bugatti is now the suitably flamboyant Jacob & Co., whose limited-edition Epic X timepiece commemorates 110 years since Bugatti’s founding and takes its cues from the body of the Veyron’s weaponised 1,500bhp successor, the Chiron – forged carbon fibre and all.

Wherein lies the beauty of the motoring chronograph. There are the rose-tinted nods of Junghans’ Meister Driver Chronoscope, to Frederique Constant’s Vintage Rally Healey. Then there’s the knowingly contemporary reinterpretations of Massena LAB, whose debut Uni-Racer is modelled after Universal Genève’s Uni-Compax of the 1960s. All crafted with an identical passion, albeit on a massively contrasting scale, but equally qualified to be tipping over the lip of Viale Venezia’s start ramp.