The Idea Of A Summer Watch, Courtesy Gorilla

... watches, that is.

The Gorilla Fastback Thunderbolt Chronograph, in partnership with Dubois-Depraz

I’m not a hundred per cent sure when it was exactly that I met Gorilla Watches founder Octavio Garcia, but I can remember where – it was at one of the SIHH watch fairs, sometime after the 2009 financial crisis but sometime before I moved from Revolution Magazine, where I’d been the US editor, to HODINKEE, in 2015. Octavio Garcia had, coincidentally, been involved with watches professionally for about as long as I had, having started with Omega in 1999, and then joining Audemars Piguet in 2003. He became AP’s creative director in 2010 – I must have met him shortly after he’d taken on the new role, and I remember being surprised at how his reserve and the feeling he gave of being something of an introspective introvert, stood in contrast to the very extroverted designs he was creating for AP. Maybe it’s not so surprising that someone as self-contained as he seemed to be, would find an outlet in designs that seemed outrageous at first but which also seemed to strive for a kind of visual harmony, albeit a very idiosyncratic harmony. You know what they say – it’s always the quiet ones.

I was less surprised later to find out that he’d grown up in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and was a muscle car and comics aficionado (he left AP well before the company’s partnership with Marvel but I wonder what he might have done with the it had he still been there).

In 2016, he left what looked to all appearances looked like a pretty solid job at Audemars (by then, François-Henry Bennahmias had been CEO for four years, having started as interim CEO in 2012) and started a company called Gorilla Watches. It was the Gorilla in the room, you might say – immediately attention-getting stuff; the company started producing some watches that clearly drew on Garcia’s creative vision as it had developed at AP but they also didn’t look a bit like anybody else’s watches. They were also almost unbelievably affordably priced – the first model, the Mirage, which I reviewed at HODINKEE as a prototype, eventually ended up retailing for $1,150 and while there were obvious decisions made to keep the price affordable (a Miyota movement, for instance) the case construction and use of materials were something you’d expect to see in watches with another zero in the price tag (at least). The watch had a ceramic bezel (well, really more of the upper part of a three-part case than a bezel per se) a red anodized aluminum layer, with a forged carbon case middle under that, and a titanium back. The watch was absolutely chock full of automotive design cues and that sort of thing can be risky because you can end up with a layer cake of clichés but I thought then, and think now, that the whole thing really sat up and sang, and part of that, I think, is because the watch was something that very few watches in my own collection could be called – it was fun.

Fun in watchmaking can exist at every price point and at every level of complexity – MB&F has made watches that are a ton of fun (in fact, pretty much all of them; I’m a fan) and they can run you upwards of six hundred grand depending on the model but if you can manage to forget about The Unpleasant Matter Of The Bill, which I have no trouble doing because I can’t afford them anyway, they are a guaranteed good time unless you are deeply suspicious of anything unconventional. Not long ago, I got hold of one of the more recent (2021) Gorilla watches – the Fastback Thunderbolt Chronograph – and not only is it gobs of good time, it also got me thinking, thanks to the time of year, about the whole notion of a summer watch.

The Fastback Thunderbolt Chronograph follows the same basic construction philosophy as other Gorilla watches, with some variations for materials, as well as some updated mechanics. The bezel is matte ceramic, with an orange anodized aluminum case middle and main case body made of DLC coated titanium; the caseback is also titanium, and we’ve got DLC coated titanium pushers and a crown of the same material. There is a lot of Super-LumiNova distributed around the bezel and dial as well, which gives the watch a nighttime-on-the-interstate vibe that goes very well with the overall design.

Image via Gorilla

The movement has also gone upscale – we’ve got an ETA 2892-A2 running under a custom Dubois-Depraz chronograph module. Fashionable as it is to look down our collective noses at DD modules, when they’re good they can be very, very good (they were good enough for Royal Oak Offshore chronographs, you betcha) and now that I’ve got a Gorilla chronograph in hand, I can say without equivocation that the chrono start/stop and reset pushers feel great – smooth, precise detent but with none of the unpleasant notchiness that you can get, and which I have gotten, in some much more pricey chronographs with so-called in-house movements. The strap is Alcantara (another car-adjacent materials shout out) you’ve got yourself double AR coated sapphire on the front and another sapphire crystal on the back, and Gorilla has gotten some great things out of that highly customized DD module from a design standpoint as well:

The chrono minute hand is pretty neat – like I said back in 2021 I’m getting a little Alaska Project vibe, which might be deliberate as Garcia did time at Omega and a guy like that doesn’t create a resemblance like that by accident. There are a ton of nice little touches, like the fact that the base of the chrono seconds hand is angled so that it’s parallel to the logo. Folks, so often in watch design as in other departments of life (like writing) the last 10% of effort makes 100% of a difference.

So what makes this a summer watch? Well first of all a summer watch generally speaking is one that you have to expect is going to get wet at some point, and maybe more than once. You might get splashed riding a log flume; you might take a dip in the blood-warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast or the not-so-blood-warm-waters off the coast of Maine; heck, you might get splashed or even dunked in the drink while your’re, you know, yachting (whatever that is). The Fastback Chrono is 100M water resistant with a screw down crown and all materials involved laugh in disdain at the threat of water so as long as you give it a rinse when you get out of the great green smothering ocean, you ought to be good to go.

But it takes more than water resistance to make a summer watch. I don’t think summer without thinking about summer vacation from elementary school, which was the purest kind, long before hitting middle and high school when there started to be significant harrumphs around the house that maybe a growing and increasingly expensive-to-keep teenager ought to seek gainful employment. Summer is a time in other words, of suspension of the rules that prevail the rest of the year; you can be indolent or hyperactively exuberant and everything in between, and if you want to spend three hours skipping stones or reading a three-week-overdue library copy of The Lord Of The Rings out in the woods with nothing but a slightly rancid bologna sandwich, a beat up surplus Boy Scout canteen full of lukewarm tap water, and a BB gun for company, nobody’s going to stop you, at least not until it’s time to hear, shouted at you through the honeysuckle scented air, that the goddam lawn’s not going to mow itself.

So that’s pretty much why for me, by my lights, the Thunderbolt Chrono is a perfect summer watch. There is plenty of time the rest of the year for me to wear things that speak to my excellent and very grown-up restrained good taste but even if I have to spend most of the summer working – and I do have to spend most of the summer working – by God, I’m going to wear a watch that says to hell with my usual propensity for muted discretion. In Smiley’s People, an affable rogue of a brothel keeper in Hamburg says to George Smiley, “Maybe you should have more fun in life,” to which Smiley agrees , “Maybe I should have done.” You can miss a lot, trying to be serious and at the very least I’ve got a watch on, right now, that’s about as symbolic of a rejection of all the Deeply Serious Horology in the world as I can think of.

Let the Gorilla give you the specs, right here. See you after Labor Day or alas, maybe not.