MB&F has announced its second-ever chronograph, the LM Sequential Flyback, a spiritual and technical follow-up to the LM Sequential EVO that evolves its predecessor’s double chronograph with the addition of a flyback function, all in a platinum version of one of MB&F’s most wearable cases.
When MB&F released the LM Sequential EVO in 2022, the biggest surprise wasn’t how good the watch was or even that MB&F would think to release a watch with not one, but two chronograph trains. No, the most surprising thing about that watch was that, up until that point, MB&F had never produced any sort of chronograph. Considering the wide range of extraordinary and experimental watches MB&F has released over the years, the omission of a chronograph seemed obvious in retrospect, even if we hadn’t noticed the glaring hole in the moment.
But that omission was more than accounted for with the release of the LM Sequential EVO, a watch that I readily count among my favorite releases of the last five or so years, and which, thanks to a pair of chronograph trains and a mechanism MB&F calls the “Twinverter” presented a new and unique take on what a chronograph could be. But apparently, it wasn’t everything MB&F and Stephen McDonnell (one of the brand’s earliest friends, who built movements for the HM No.1 and developed the movements for the Legacy Machine Perpetual, the LM Sequential EVO, and, now, the LM Sequential Flyback) wanted it to be.
Development constraints and the inherent challenges of bringing a new movement to market (especially a complex one), prevented the inclusion of a flyback function in the LM Sequential EVO, though apparently prototypes of the earlier movement were made that included a flyback function on the left-hand chronograph before the idea was put on ice. But none of these hurdles were problems that two more years of experimentation and development couldn’t fix, and the results speak for themselves. I can honestly say that I have never seen or experienced a flyback chronograph that works quite like this one.
The two chronographs can operate concurrently and can be controlled either independently or together. While the left-hand chronograph is principally controlled by a pair of pushers at 10 and 8 o’clock and the right-hand chronograph is controlled primarily by equivalents at 2 and 4 o’clock, the LM Sequential Flyback retains the Twinverter pusher at 9 o’clock, allowing wearers of the watch to start or stop both chronograph trains simultaneously. It’s a unique interface, but one that helps justify the inclusion of paired chronographs by allowing wearers to use the two chronographs in tandem.
Each chronograph’s readout can be read thanks to a pair of subdials arranged to mirror each other, with a pair of 30-minute counters splitting 12 o’clock, while a larger pair of 60-second counters fill most of the dial space across from 9 to 3 o’clock. A balance wheel sits above these four dials, while timekeeping is made possible thanks to a small inclined dial at 6 o’clock.
The LM Sequential Flyback isn’t a small watch, nor does it promise to be a light one. At 44mm across the wrist in platinum, and with a severely domed sapphire crystal pushing the thickness to 18.2mm, this is not a small watch. The case of the LM Sequential Flyback hews closer to the classical architecture of the Legacy Machine than the slightly sportier variant used by the EVO.
This choice to lean on a slightly more traditional aesthetic (if anything MB&F does can be considered traditional) is reinforced by the use of blued hands and white lacquered inclined dials and rings to display the time and all the scales needed to read the chronographs, as is the choice of a leather strap, used here in place of the EVO’s rubber option.
The initial release of the LM Sequential Flyback is a limited edition, and the combination of sky blue dial plate and white lacquer accents is limited to just 33 examples. It’s a lovely colorway, and one that just screams summer, though I don’t expect to encounter one of these at the beach this year — though I have a feeling the watch would feel right at home on the Côte d’Azur.
The LM Sequential Flyback in sky blue is a limited edition of 33, and is priced at $218,000. MB&F
