News Of The Week: Feb 24th 2026

Hello and welcome to the Fourth Wheel’s weekly news bulletin. I’m back from illness and raring to go - except I’m horrendously behind, which is why this is going out about twelve hours late. Let’s call it an experiment in hitting the all-important commute home window for all my North American listeners…This week I pick over news that Breitling’s private equity owners had to downgrade the value of their investment, and what that might mean for the company - including a speculative thought or two about their eventual exit - and reflect on how this news arrives hot on the back of two corporate reports hailing the general ill-health of Breitling’s core market segment. I persist in describing watches in a purely audio medium with my summary of Habring2’s Chrono-Felix ‘Medicus’, a limited edition collaboration with SJX and a watch I approve of very much. Ditto Citizen’s already-sold-out collab with Seconde/Seconde/; not so much Mido’s boring copy-paste of a Girard-Perregaux. I recommend, as a ‘one you might have missed’, SJX’s insanely complicated piece on the science of resonance, by David Ichim. It’s mostly beyond me, and I’m ok admitting that, but I still think it should be as widely read as possible. Lastly, in the Indie Brand Launch Of The Week slot I take a look at the Black Tulip, which sounds like a great title for a novel or an arthouse movie but is in fact the debut watch from Dutch watchmaker Annalise Dunselman. We may not need any more three-hand, manually-wound indie watches for nearly fifty grand, but too bad, we’ve got ‘em: at least it looks great. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you back here next week for more. Chris Get full access to The Fourth Wheel at www.thefourthwheel.co.uk/subscribe