Yesterday evening, Christie’s held their Speedmaster 50 Auction in New York. Although no-one of our team could be there on location, we did get some help from Sacha Davidoff for this report. He is one of the founders and owners of the Roy & Sacha Davidoff boutique, the place for vintage cheap replica watches in Geneva. He was in New York to witness the auction and spoke to one of the guys who submitted a substantial amount of fake watches for the auction, Riccardo Bernard.
Sacha Davidoff: “Riccardo Bernard is the major contributor, in terms of the Christie’s Speedmaster 50 auction collection. He is a collector with an affinity for space and aeronautics who worked for major air companies. His first replica watches UK was a Rolex GMT-Master (with the PanAm connection) made sense with regards to his professional background, but then he became addicted to vintage Speedmaster watches in the 1990’s. He plans to one day go into space and is currently also an avid vintage car collector, especially Porsche. On top of that, he is the importer of Porsche in Scandinavia. The big question, why would he want to sell this amazing collection? First, he wanted to mark his achievement and he is glad that the Speedmaster catalog is beautiful. He had a hard copy printed in very limited quantity. On a more secretive note, the proceeds of the sale are going to go towards his dream of flying into space!”
The Results
With an estimate of somewhere between $500,000.- USD and $1,000,000.- USD, the total result of $1,304,125.- USD is certainly not bad. Let us go through some high-lights of the Christie’s Speedmaster 50 Auction of last evening. I’ve received a couple of notes of Sacha Davidoff that he took before the auction, and of course I do see the results on the official Christie’s website. So let’s go and see what happened.
Flown Speedmaster Pro 145.022
The top seller of Christie’s Speedmaster 50 Auction was the flown Apollo 17 Speedmaster Professional with caliber 861, lot 15.
Lot 15 fetched a staggering $245,000.- USD. This Swiss replica watches was owned by Apollo 17 astronaut Ron Evans and comes with a couple of other space memorabilia. It wasn’t used on the Moon, or even worn on the wrist during the Apollo 17, it was used to perform tests on board and was attached to a dash board. The watch has been engraved by Ron Evans himself to mark its adventure on board of the CSM.
CK2915 References
Lot 3, the Speedmaster CK2915-1 from 1957 realized $137,000 USD. According to Sacha Davidoff “This is the most sought after and valuable regular production Speedmaster as it is the first generation of the first reference. Submitted by Somlo, owner of the Omega vintage shop in London, with some speculation to the origin of the case (finishings) and the dial as well, the estimate is a bit high and will be interesting to see if it is reached.”. The estimate was between $100,000.- USD and $150,000.- USD, so the result is quite nice I think.
Sacha’s words on the case are something that I’ve echoed in this article as well. As I wrote in that earlier article “….it seems to be some kind of early case made by Huguenin Frères that could also be seen in early Speedmaster advertisements. Whether this specific replica Omega watches was used as a subject to that campaign is not clear, but that could be the case (no pun intended) of course.”. It is interesting to see that both CK2915 references fetched well over $100,000.- USD. Lot 4 was the CK2915-2 and estimated between $50,000.- USD and $80,000.- USD. The result of $118,750.- USD is therefore impressive.
CK2998 References
Another Speedmaster that did extremely well in my opinion, is lot 5. As Sacha describes it “Beautiful tropical CK 2998-1, base 1000 bezel, and with the numbers that these have been trading in close circles of collectors (behind the scenes) should easily reach the high estimate. Sadly the bracelet is not correct as date 65, but still nice and a detail for such a grail fake watches for sale.”. As I wrote in my earlier article on the Christie’s Speedmaster 50 Auction: “For me personally, the CK2998 is something like the grail Speedmaster. I prefer it over a CK2915, without wanting to doubt the historical significance of that one. I just prefer the black bezel over the steel bezel and love those Alpha hands. For me, the CK2998 comes close to the Moonwatch as we know it today.”. The estimate of this beautiful CK2998-1 was between $20,000.- and $40,000.- USD and the result was $50,000.- USD. Lot 7 (CK2998-62) and Lot 6 (CK2998-4) fetched resp. $28,750.- USD and $20,000.- USD which are still very respectable amounts for the Speedmaster reference CK2998. This reference is clearly highly sought-after and the prices went up quite a bit during the last 2-3 years. Hello vintage Daytona prices.