Bradley Price is 31-year-old product designer from Brooklyn, New York, with a special passion for cars and a pretty creative mind. Combine those two and you get an interesting mix.
A couple of years ago, while driving his red 1983 Alfa Romeo GTV6 2.5 (yes, he’s our kind of guy), Price had an inspiration: design a line of watches loosely inspired by sports car instrument panel gauges. Upon returning home, Price went to the drawing board and began rendering watch faces based on car gauges he admired.
The Brooklyn native continued to work on the designs of both the watch faces and casings and ended up creating a new company named Autodromo for his products.
“There are so many wonderful gauge designs from the 1960s and ’70s that I love,” Price told the New York Times in a recent interview. “I did some research and saw that no one was doing that for watches.”
Even though he owned a few chronographs from the 1970s, Price admits that he knew nothing about watchmaking before he embarked on his new adventure. However, he did see a market for car enthusiasts.
“If you look at the watches out there for car guys, there are two categories,” he said in the interview. “Either they’re very expensive chronographs or they’re cheesy carbon-fiber watches with a 15-year-old’s aesthetic.”
Price currently offers five watches through his Autodromo website: Brescia, Vallelunga with a black or white dial, and the Veloce (apparently inspired by his Alfa) with either a PVD black or a stainless steel case, all priced at US$425 (about €330 at today’s exchange rates).
The possibilities for new watches inspired by car gauges are endless – perhaps you can throw a couple of ideas in our comments section below.
Aside from expanding the watch line, the young designer also plans to add a clothing line that will include driving gloves and shoes, and for this reason, he will travel to Bologna, Italy, in February to purchase some leather. “I am sure whatever I do, I plan to give a rented Alfa a serious caning,” said Price.
Price, who describes himself as a “dyed in the wool” car guy but not a “gearhead” claiming to be more into ” design and driving pleasure”, has posted a video filmed while driving with a friend in a BMW 3-Series E30 (another one of our favorites from the 1980s) at the famous “Tail of the Dragon” at Deals Gap in the Smoky Mountains, which you can watch below.
By John Halas
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PHOTO GALLERY
