Mark XX Petronas

Following up on the post I made about ordering the M+ Mark XX Petronas.

Well the day has arrived and I have the watch in hand. I’m not an IWC expert or particularly discerning when it comes to QC. I’ve never RL’d a watch and never used ReptimeQC to do a QC for me. I also have never seen this gen in person so I don’t have a good reference for what you’ll see below.

This purchase was just for fun since I like F1 and hate really busy dials, so it seemed like a fun watch purchase compared to the other F1 variants.

First impressions:

Build Quality: The watch case is pretty solid and the titanium is quite appealing. The colorway of the dial is actually darker than I expected and a bit darker than my phone pictures make it seem. Maybe it’s all in my head, but the blue does seem a bit darker than I expected. The second hand definitely seems a bit thicker than I expected and maybe it’s this thick in gen 🤷.

Lume and dial markings seem pretty good. I like what they did with the gen lume and the rep doesn’t disappoint.

The biggest downfall is the strap… it just feels so damn cheap. It actually feels cheaper than some of the bad straps I’ve ordered on AliX… if this were an investment piece I think the first thing I would do is buy a gen strap… but that’s basically the same cost as the rep 😀. I may still do that lol.

The rotor is pretty loud, but nothing a service and rotor silencing probably couldn’t fix.

All in all I’m happy with this purchase, and it will likely have a place on my wrist on race days. Will it see the outside world? Probably not in its current state, only possible if I make the investment in a gen strap and get a service done.

I will be interested to see when V7 comes out with this and hear someone with more discerning taste take a crack at reviewing this.