Our Take

JPS. John Player Special. Three letters evoking the legendary association of black and gold. More than a brand, a whole universe, an iconic colour code; that of Team Lotus with its totally revolutionary, unbeatable cars, the most successful of their time, often cited as the most beautiful Formula 1 cars ever built! JPS is like a mechanical dream. A succession of victories. Seven Constructors' World Championship titles, six Drivers' World Championship titles shared by legendary drivers such as Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Jochen Rindt, Emerson Fittipaldi, Mario Andretti... What an era!

Those of us who were boys and girls in the early 1970s remember seeing the black and gold 'rockets' through their teenage eyes; the drivers and their black and gold suits; the black and gold helmets; the engineers whose work we glimpsed for the first time thanks to the installation of cameras in the pits...

Lotus JPS cars were also the first single-seaters to take full advantage of the major technological advances of the time, as well as research aerodynamics, and the first computer-assisted developments... F1 helped shape the collective imagination. Fearsome and severe black paired with glorious gleaming gold made JPS a 1970s benchmark from which De Bethune drew inspiration for a new version of its DB28GS 'JPS' sports watch.

A sporty black and gold watch; a nod to the bold 'JPS' spirit of the era

What a pleasure for Denis Flageollet and his team to go back to that time and indulge in “tuning” his first sports watch – the DB28GS – so as to offer a black and gold version in steel, titanium and zirconium.

Constantly refining the structural nuances hovering between polished and matt, dark grey and deep black, while sparingly adding golden accents that are in fact yellow titanium – a new opportunity to demonstrate De Bethune's expertise in working with the oxidation of titanium and its colour palette. De Bethune blue, the brand's historic and pioneering signature, is now succeeded by a golden yellow colour, for which the creative process required new assembly techniques and new texturing skills – all of which Denis Flageollet and his team have developed to bring the project to fruition and thus pay tribute to this formidable era of high-tech discoveries.

The Details

DB28GS ‘JPS’

Type: Mechanical Hand Wound

Adjustment: Winding and setting the time by means of the crown (2 positions), push button at 6 o’clock to activate the lightening

Power Reserve: 5 days, ensured by a self-regulating twin barrel De Bethune Innovation (2004)

Functions: Hours, Minutes, Seconds, Power reserve indication between 9 and 10 o’clock, unidirectional rotating bezel, manual dial lighting.

Dial:

• Black Satin-brushed grade 5 titanium minutes dial with cut-out Arabic numerals
• Rotating bezel crystal with metallised minutes ring

Display:

• Black titanium hours and minutes hands with black polished steel insert and second yellow steel insert, luminescent tip
• Polished steel seconds hand with luminescent tip
• Power-reserve indicator between 9 and 10 o’clock

Case: Black zirconium case middle with “Microlight” decoration, black brushed and polished harden stainless steel caseback and bezel

Glass: In sapphire crystal (1800 Vickers hardness) with double anti-reflective coating

Back: open in black polished harden stainless steel

Strap: Natural rubber strap + 1 canvas / leather strap