News · Baltic

Baltic skips the chronograph and makes the dashboard instrument instead

A 300-piece dash-mounted pair for the Tour Auto: a Hanhart flyback stopwatch and a 6497 dashclock, 60 mm each, under high-domed hesalite.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 18 August 2026

• Baltic has marked its fourth year as official timekeeper of the Tour Auto with a dashboard-mounted timing set rather than another wrist chronograph.
• The pair combines a Hanhart 122 flyback stopwatch with an ENLOONG 6497 dashclock, both manual winding, on light blue satin dials with azurage subdials.
• The set is limited to 300 numbered examples, and Baltic has not published a price, a water resistance rating or a reference number.

Not everything worth timing goes on a wrist

Watch brands that sponsor motorsport almost always end up making the same object: a chronograph, in a case, on a strap, with the event's name printed somewhere on the dial. Baltic has been the official timekeeper of the Tour Auto for four years now and has finally done the obvious thing that nobody does, which is to make the instrument the cars actually carry. The Rally Timer Tour Auto 2026 Limited Edition is a pair of dials on a plate, made to be bolted to a dashboard.

If you have ever looked at the interior of a car built for a historic rally, this is a familiar object rather than an invention. The navigator's side of the dash carries a clock and a stopwatch, mounted together, because road-book rallying is not about outright speed but about arriving at a point at a stated time. Baltic has taken that arrangement and made it properly rather than approximately.

Two instruments, two different jobs

On the left is the stopwatch, a flyback, which is exactly the right complication for this and not a decorative choice. Flyback means one press resets and restarts the timing in a single action, so a navigator moving between stages does not have to stop, reset and start again while the car is moving. On the right is the dashclock, which does nothing more complicated than tell you the time of day, which is the number the whole discipline is organised around.

Both dials are done in a light blue satin finish with off-white azurage on the subdials, and the combination is much softer than the black-on-white racing instruments this is descended from. Azurage, the fine concentric turning that catches light in rings, is the sort of finishing that usually shows up on a small seconds register you need a loupe to appreciate. Here it is on a dial roughly the size of a coaster.

Sixty millimetres across, and hesalite over the top

Each instrument measures 60 mm in diameter and 18 mm thick, made in 316L stainless steel, which on a dashboard mount is not a size at all but on any other object would be enormous. Over each dial is a high-domed hesalite crystal, and that is a considered choice rather than a cost one. Hesalite distorts at the edges in exactly the way period instruments did, and more usefully it does not shatter, which matters in a car where an impact would turn a sapphire disc into a problem.

The whole assembly reads as a piece of equipment rather than jewellery, and that is a harder thing to design than it sounds. Plenty of brands have made dashboard clocks that are really desk clocks in disguise. This one has crown positions and pushers where a gloved hand would reach for them.

A Hanhart flyback, which is a genuinely unexpected sourcing decision

The stopwatch runs a Hanhart 122 flyback, manual winding, with a six-hour power reserve. Six hours sounds meagre until you consider what it is for: a competitive stage, not a day, and you wind it before you set off in the same way you would check your fuel. The dashclock runs an ENLOONG 6497, manual winding, with 42 hours, which will comfortably see out a long day of driving and a night parked up.

Going to Hanhart for a flyback movement is the part I find most interesting. Hanhart has been making stopwatches in the Black Forest since long before anybody made watches for a French road rally, and it is a piece of sourcing that only makes sense if you care about the specific mechanism rather than the badge. Baltic tends to make decisions like that.

Three hundred, numbered on the back

The edition runs to 300 pieces, numbered 001 to 300 on the caseback. That is a large number for an object as specific as this and a small one for a brand with Baltic's following, which tells you the company thinks there are more people who want a rally dash set than there are people who own a rally car. They are almost certainly right, and there is something slightly funny about an instrument built for a navigator's line of sight ending up on a shelf. It will look magnificent there.

Baltic has not published a price, a water resistance rating or a reference number for the set, which is not unusual this early in a limited release. What it has published is everything about how the thing works, which is the more interesting half.

Baltic Rally Timer Tour Auto 2026 Limited Edition pricing and availability

The Rally Timer Tour Auto 2026 Limited Edition is limited to 300 numbered sets, sold directly by Baltic, and marks the brand's fourth year as official timekeeper of the Tour Auto. Baltic has not published a price in any currency, nor a water resistance rating or a reference number, and no Australian availability has been announced.