Lorige

Lorige was founded by three partners with genuine motorsport pedigree: Clément Etienvre, a mechanical and production engineer trained at the École de la Performance who spent eight years designing and machining race cars before co-founding the house and now serves as CEO; Philippe Dumas, a former driver at the 24 Hours of Le Mans who now manages top racing drivers and contributes to the brand operationally and strategically; and Emeric Paraud, trained at the Sbarro school of automotive prototyping and a specialist in high-performance Carbon/Carbon composites for more than a decade, who shapes the brand's design direction. Their first watch, the Gris Circuit, was revealed in 2019; the house is Swiss Made across workshops in Geneva and La Chaux-de-Fonds.

The brand's defining material innovation is genuinely unique: Lorige sources actual race-used Carbon/Carbon brake components directly from motorsport teams, each arriving with a documented history of the driver, car, race, and mileage behind it. Developing a patented process to rework that material into watch cases took more than three years; each case then takes over 30 hours to complete, alternating heat-treatment and vacuum cycles across seven separate shaping stages, yielding two finished cases from a single brake pad. Every case is individually engraved with the identity of its original component and accompanied by a certificate of origin tracing its path from the racetrack to the Lorige workshop.

The house's most ambitious project is the AS-01, its case and dial machined from a Carbon/Carbon brake pad taken from the actual McLaren MP4/8 driven and signed by Ayrton Senna during the 1993 Formula 1 championship. Its calibre, the LOR-TC01, is a hand-wound flying central tourbillon developed over a year of research with Dominique Renaud and the late Pierre Favre — 323 components, double barrels running for 93 hours, a deliberate nod to 1993, adjusted in six positions, with Senna's three Formula 1 championship titles engraved into the upper titanium tourbillon cage. Limited to just eight pieces, it is priced on demand.

A more accessible entry point sits in the Evolution line, exemplified by the Gris Circuit — a re-edition of that original 2019 model, its name a reference to the orange glow of racing brakes under heat. Its calibre, the LOR-DB02, runs double hand-wound barrels for 168 hours, or seven days, of reserve across 175 components and 29 jewels, fitted with a dynamometric crown and finished in an exclusive 'Duo-Tone' treatment combining Côtes de Genève with hand-angled edges. Limited to 50 pieces at 25,025 Swiss francs excluding VAT, each case is engraved with its original brake pad's identity and completed through more than 20 separate hand-finishing operations.