Auctions Steve McQueen’s 'Le Mans' Heuer Monaco Is Heading To Auction At Sotheby's

There is a very short list of watches that have ever broken free from the watch-collecting community and entered into the wider cultural conversation. Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona is on the list, the Submariner that Sean Connery wore as Bond is on the list, and up there with them is the square-cased, blue-dialled, left-crowned Heuer Monaco ref. 1133B that Steve McQueen wore in Le Mans (1971).

On June 15, the last and arguably most significant of the Monacos known to have been worn during the making of that film is going under the hammer at Sotheby's New York, with a pre-sale estimate of US$500,000 to US$1,000,000 (~A$710,000 to ~A$1,420,000). The watch in question is case number 159,381, which arrives accompanied by a lockbox containing around 400 documents and more than 200 archival photographs, together representing the most comprehensive primary archive of the film's production that has ever been made public. 

With such well-documented provenance and a direct link to the King of Cool himself, it’s shaping up to be one of the auction lots of the year, with an outside possibility of challenging the current record price paid for a TAG Heuer of US$2.2 million in 2020.

To understand the significance of this sale, it’s worth taking a moment to look back on not only the history of the Le Mans film, but also of the Monaco itself. When Jack Heuer unveiled the Monaco at the Basel trade fair in March of 1969, he was announcing two things simultaneously: one of the world's first automatic chronograph movements, and a radical new design that very few would immediately understand. 

The calibre 11 movement was developed jointly with Breitling, Hamilton-Buren, and Dubois-Depraz, and was one of the more important technical achievements of 20th-century watchmaking, arriving at almost exactly the same moment as Zenith's competing El Primero and Seiko’s calibre 6139. However, the movement was almost secondary to the case and as TAG Heuer Heritage Director Nicholas Biebuyck tells HODINKEE ANZ, "this alien spaceship that arrived in 1969. It was three years before the Royal Oak and seven years before the Nautilus. We'd not seen this kind of angular, brushed and polished, brutalist-designed watch before."

The general public, by and large, didn't want it, and the Monaco was discontinued around 1974, a brief run of black PVD-coated examples notwithstanding. Despite its commercial challenges, the Monaco did attract a certain kind of person, with known owners including many of the cultural elite at the time, such as Stanley Kubrick, Sammy Davis Jr., Oscar Peterson, and, crucially for this story, Steve McQueen.

McQueen arrived at the Circuit de la Sarthe in April 1970 to begin pre-production filming on Le Mans, which he had been building towards for years. He was intent on creating as much authenticity as possible on set, with the Gulf Oil–liveried Porsche 917 he would drive on screen being the same car being campaigned by the John Wyer team in the real Le Mans, in part due to McQueen modelling himself on Jo Siffert, the Swiss Formula 1 ace who drove for Wyer.

Siffert had been a Heuer man since 1969, when Jack Heuer, his marketing budget stretched thin after the costly development of the calibre 11, found a more efficient route to visibility through motorsport sponsorship in one of the first such arrangements in the industry. This saw a Monaco being on set when prop master Don Nunley, “laid all the watches down the table and told McQueen to choose one,” according to Biebuyck. McQueen reportedly first picked up an Omega Speedmaster before he was reminded of the Heuer patch on his suit (as well as the fact that Siffert wore a Heuer), and instead picked up a Monaco.

Once the Monaco had been selected, additional examples were requested from Switzerland, with a shipment of watches dispatched in late June of 1970 that included around 20 automatic chronographs, 17 stopwatches, a handful of manual-wind watches, dashboard timers, and most importantly, six blue Monaco ref. 1133Bs: four on leather straps, and two on steel bracelets. Those six production Monacos, plus the one already on set for pre-production work, bring the total to seven. 

"It was seven Monaco 1133Bs that were on set," Biebuyck confirms, in a revision to the figure of six that had been the previously accepted count.

When production wrapped in November 1970, Jack Heuer instructed Nunley to liquidate the watches to recoup some of the cost, with the total value of the shipment running to around CHF 10,000 (inflation-adjusted to somewhere in the region of A$57,000 today). Nunley began selling them, and Bevan Weston, the mechanic for Derek Bell's Ferrari 512S, told Biebuyck he paid US$50 for his Monaco. McQueen got wind of the sales and suspected Nunley was pocketing a kickback from Heuer, prompting the creation of the rudimentary paper trail that now forms part of the archive.

The archive also contains "the original letters from Jack to the producer of the movie trying to negotiate the deal with McQueen," as Biebuyck puts it. He describes the lockbox as something genuinely unprecedented: "an Ark of the Covenant-style thing where it has hundreds of letters that detail the sports sponsorships." Beyond its direct significance to the filming of Le Mans, the lockbox also documents an early moment in the evolution of how modern brand relationships in film and sport look today.

 Of the seven Monaco 1133Bs on the Le Mans set, we know the provenance of six:

• Case 159,381: Nunley's last watch, and the one he said was the most worn by McQueen. This is the example set to be auctioned by Sotheby’s on June 15.
• Case 160,304 (the "Bevan Weston" watch): Almost certainly the pre-production watch that McQueen picked up from Nunley's table, later fitted to a steel bracelet. Sold by a private collector at Sotheby's New York in December 2024 for US$1,440,000 (at the time, the second-highest price ever achieved for a Heuer at auction).
• Case 160,346: Went to Helmut Kellner, a German racing driver who worked on the film. Sold to a European collector, where it remains.
• Case 160,503: Given by McQueen to his financial adviser, Bill Maher. Sold at Antiquorum, June 2009, for US$87,600. Now with a US collector.
• Case 160,903: Acquired at some point connected to Nunley's post-production dispersals. Now on permanent display in the TAG Heuer museum.
• Unknown Case Number: Sold at the Profiles in History Hollywood auction in 2012 for approximately US$800,000. Present location unknown.
• Unknown Case Number: Famously, the Monaco that McQueen reportedly handed to his personal mechanic, Haig Altounian, with the words "thank you for keeping me alive all these months," engraved on the back with "To Haig Le Mans 1970." Sold at Phillips in December 2020 for US$2,208,000, which is the current world record for any Heuer at auction. The provenance story is potent, even if, as Biebuyck notes with characteristic candour, the anecdote should be "taken with a pinch of salt." Despite requests, Phillips has never disclosed the case number.

What makes the June 2026 lot different from its predecessors isn’t just its provenance; it’s also the condition that it arrives for sale in. The watch is still on its original leather strap with a single hole that’s clearly been worn – a detail that Biebuyck takes as evidence that only one person (or two people with the same-sized wrist) ever wore it – the crystal is a little frosted, and the case is dented and scratched.

"When you hold the watch in your hand," Biebuyck tells me, "it’s evident that this is a watch that has lived a heavy life."

This is the watch Nunley described as the most screen-worn, and as a result, it’s also the last one he parted with, selling it in 2009 to a significant car collector who is now the consignor. This collector bought not only the watch, but also the lockbox. 

"The thing for me is the documentation," Biebuyck says. "I would just love to have the documentation." According to Biebuyck, the lockbox has "taken on a mystical status among the community that has been tracking the watches that were used during the filming of the movie."

The main question that remains is what case 159,381 will sell for. The estimate of US$500,000 to US$1,000,000 is, as Biebuyck observes bluntly, "a come-and-get-me price," but that a more realistic final hammer result will be "somewhere between a million and two million bucks".

It’s a reasonable prediction in the context that the Bevan Weston Monaco (likely the pre-production watch and the one McQueen first selected) achieved US$1.44 million in December 2024. The argument for this lot selling for even higher is that "screen-worn often outweighs everything else," according to Biebuyck, referencing Nunley’s confirmation that McQueen wore it more than any other watch on set.

Despite this, Biebuyck is sensibly hesitant about putting too much weight behind a prediction. Sure, the appetite for watches with exceptional provenance remains strong, but the frothy, COVID-era market that saw the Haig Altounian-owned Monaco sell for US$2.2 million in 2020 (more than ten times the pre-sale estimate) is a far cry from the market of today. 

As is always the case for the sale of top lots, "you have to find not one, but two people who are motivated by that story," Biebuyck says. "And that is the major question – who are those two people?"

The Steve McQueen-worn Heuer Monaco will go under the hammer as lot 71 of Sotheby’s Important Watches auction in New York on June 15, due to get underway at 10 AM EDT (midnight on the 16th for those in AEST). Find out more here.