Don Nunley spent decades as one of Hollywood’s most trusted property masters, the person responsible for every object that appeared on screen. Of everything that passed through his hands, one piece never left, until now.
The Heuer Monaco that Steve McQueen wore ‘most’ during the filming of Le Mans is coming to auction for the first time at Sotheby’s New York on June 15, with an estimate of $500,000 to $1 million, and it is arriving with an incredible level of documented history.
Coming with the watch is a fully documented record of where this piece has been since it left the Heuer factory in 1970. A lockbox containing over 400 documents, letters exchanged between the film set and Heuer, and more than 200 photographs taken during production will be sold alongside it. Sotheby’s has confirmed that more from the archive will be shared publicly in the months leading up to the sale.
Before it reaches New York, the watch is on public display at Grimaldi Forum Monaco till April 25, timed around RM Sotheby’s Monaco auction and the Grand Prix de Monaco Historique. It will be the first time the piece has been seen in public since McQueen wore it on screen, more than 50 years ago.
Seven Heuer Monacos with blue dials were sent directly from the Heuer factory to the Le Mans production. When filming ended in late 1970, Nunley kept three of them. He sold two in the early 2000s, and one of those eventually reached the TAG Heuer Museum in Switzerland, where it remains on permanent display today. This watch is the last one Nunley held on to, and by his own repeated account over the years, it was the one McQueen wore the most during filming. Its condition today reflects exactly that.
Letters between Jack Heuer and Nunley lay out how the watches were organised for the production. Other correspondence sheds light on McQueen’s connection to Jo Siffert, the celebrated Swiss racing driver who was a direct inspiration for McQueen’s character in the film, Michael Delaney. Several other names from the production appear throughout the archive, including Sidney Ganis, the film’s publicist, Ray Summers, the costume designer, and Bev Weston, the mechanic who had previously owned the Monaco that sold at Sotheby’s in 2024. This accompanying documentation makes the Heuer Monaco more than just a watch, breathing a full life into it.
To understand where this watch sits in the market, a separate Monaco from the Le Mans set, believed to have been used during pre-production and fitted with a stainless steel bracelet, sold at Sotheby’s New York in December 2024 for $1,440,000. That result put a clear number on what this association is worth to collectors. This watch has more time on screen and a significantly deeper paper trail behind it.
Launched in 1969, the Heuer Monaco was introduced alongside the Calibre 11 movement, developed jointly by Heuer, Breitling, Hamilton-Büren, and movement maker Dubois Dépraz, making it one of the first automatic chronograph wristwatches available to the public. Its square, water-resistant case, with brushed and polished finishes, was unlike anything else being produced at the time, and it did not find an immediate commercial audience. Le Mans changed that trajectory over time. When TAG Heuer brought the Monaco back in 1997, it used McQueen’s image from the film in its advertising campaigns, and the watch found a commercial audience it had never managed during its original run. What the film could not do for sales in 1971, it did comprehensively, a quarter of a century later.
McQueen made Le Mans as a personal tribute to motorsport. Unable to compete in racing while filming other movies, he founded Solar Productions specifically to make films that captured the world of endurance racing, a world he knew well from competing in events like the 12 Hours of Sebring. Through a partnership with JW Engineering, he gained access to the Porsche 917 in its Gulf livery for the film, one of the most recognisable racing cars ever built, to anchor the high-speed sequences on the Mulsanne straight.
Nicholas Biebuyck, TAG Heuer’s Heritage Director, said, “The cultural moment of Steve McQueen wearing the Heuer Monaco in Le Mans has reverberated across decades and would play a huge role in giving birth to the icon that the collection has become today. The last watch of Don Nunley and the treasure trove of documentation has taken on a mystical status among the community that has been tracking the watches that were used during the filming of the movie, so to finally see it come to auction and to have the chance to gain a new understanding of the history of these pieces in a new way is an incredible moment.”
Sotheby’s Important Watches sale takes place on June 15 in New York. Of the seven blue-dial Monacos sent to the Le Mans set, one now lives in a museum, one sold for $1,440,000 in December 2024, and this is the last to come to market from Nunley’s personal collection. Its estimate stands at $500,000 to $1 million, a range that the December result has already shown the market is prepared to exceed.
