This was my 21st birthday present from my parents.
I hadn't known the one with the red hands existed it had presumably been in stock for a while and Dad got a deal. Turns out it is very rare so lives in the safe now after about 20 years as my daily from 1971. The original bracelet was a bit flimsy and wore out completely and this one was fitted at a service at Omega. This has the 321 movement.
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If you're gonna own a Speedie, that's the way to do it--an original unicorn variation. That one would have looked right at home in the pits, as would a Heuer Carrera (from the 60's) and a Rolex Daytona.
You can tell it's a Lemania movement just from the angle spacing of the chronograph pushers. Valjoux movements of the day (which Rolex and Heuer both used at that time) were more widely spaced. My mid-90's Heuer Carrera Re-Edition is visually nearly identical to the original 1963 model, but has a Lemania 1872 instead of the Valjoux it would have originally used, and the pusher spacing is the only obvious difference.
Here's my mid-90's Carrera Re-Edition of the Deci-12 model from 1964:
And here is a vintage Carrera with the Valjoux movement, from the On The Dash website:
The tell (besides the obvious aging) is the pusher spacing. Well, except that for some strange reason Heuer didn't print "Carrera" on the dial when they reissued it. But at least they also didn't print the "TAG" part of the later logo.
By the middle 90's, Valjoux was owned by ETA which was part of Swatch, and Lemania was owned by Investcorp which had Ebel and Breguet as sister companies. Ebel also owned 25% of Heuer in the mid-90's. In 1999, Ebel was sold to LVMH which by that time had the rest of Heuer (and Zenith, Hublot, and others); Breguet and Lemania were sold to Swatch. After that, Swatch devoted Lemania to making movements for Breguet, and the Lemania buildings now have a "Manufacture Breguet" sign out front. Omega is also part of Swatch, so Lemania and Omega had come full circle. Omega, Tissot and Lemania were sister companies in SSIH from 1930 until Omega and Tissot were merged into what became Swatch in 1983. Lemania survived with money from the Piaget family after that, until Investcorp acquired them. Piaget also owned Heuer by then, but when Piaget was bought by Cartier in 1986 or so, Cartier didn't want Heuer, so TAG bought a bare majority and Ebel bought 25% to keep them going.
Rick "supplier of yet another useless factoid or two" Denney
