This is the version the model launched with in gold. The LineSport Chronographe Rattrapante arrived in 2018 in three metals, and the 18K 6N gold execution took a silver dial covered in ruthenium with matte gold numerals applied over it, on a gold bracelet. The case is 44 mm and just over twelve millimeters deep, hammered and polished, with a ceramic tachymeter bezel and rubber inserts at the caseband and bracelet. It is a split-seconds chronograph operated by two pushers, and it remains the most complicated watch the sports line has carried. The dial has since been replaced by a blackened version and this one is no longer listed.
Hammering is what makes a gold sports watch tolerable at this size. The case and bracelet are worked to a dimpled surface and then polished, so the metal scatters light instead of throwing it, and the result reads as texture rather than as shine. Rubber inserts sit in the caseband and between the bracelet links, and the crown is over-molded in rubber as well, all of it there for impact rather than for appearance. The dial is solid silver, guilloche worked and then covered in ruthenium, which produces a gray-brown surface that shifts toward blue as the light changes. Numerals are applied in matte gold. Two counters in whitened guilloche silver sit at three and nine, and a very large date opens at six in a window wide enough to read without looking twice. That window is what separates this chronograph from the earlier one. It measures a little over five millimeters across and is built from two discs so it can be that wide, which is the same solution the Octa family has used for two decades applied to a case with a chronograph already in it. Fitting both into twelve millimeters of depth is the reason the movement had to be designed for this watch rather than borrowed from the earlier one. Nothing else on the dial is printed except the scales inside the counters.
The 1518 is a monopusher split-seconds chronograph, which is two ideas at once. Monopusher means the pusher at two runs the whole cycle in sequence, starting, stopping and returning the hand to zero from one control, so there is nothing to confuse. The rattrapante is worked from a second pusher at four: a hand sits directly beneath the chronograph seconds, and pressing that pusher halts it while the first hand carries on, so an intermediate time can be read and the split hand then jumps forward to rejoin the running one. The register at three counts thirty minutes and jumps rather than creeps. Journe replaced the horizontal coupling used in the earlier unique piece with a rocking pinion, which stops the hand twitching at the moment the chronograph is started. Direct gearing with a rocking pinion is not a common choice and it solves a specific irritation. On most chronographs the seconds hand twitches when the mechanism engages, because a clutch wheel has to mesh with a wheel already turning, and the hand moves a fraction before it settles. A rocking pinion transfers the drive without that hesitation, so the hand starts from where it is and goes. On a split-seconds watch, where the reading is the whole point, that fraction matters more than it does elsewhere. The mechanism runs to two hundred and eighty-five parts.
The rattrapante was the second complication the sports line took on and it settled what the collection was for. A hundredth of a second chronograph came first in the Centigraphe, and the split-seconds followed in 2018 with a movement built specifically for the case rather than adapted into it, which is why the very large date could be included at all. Three versions launched together in titanium, gold and platinum, and the range has since widened to four. The gold with a ruthenium dial is the original of the precious metal pair and has since been joined by a blackened guilloche version, which is the more formal of the two. Neither has an edition size. What the line did not do was soften the watch to make the complication easier to sell. A split-seconds chronograph is normally the reserve of a dress collection, presented as the most serious thing a maker builds and treated accordingly, and putting one in a 44 mm case with rubber inserts and a metal bracelet inverts that entirely. Journe has been consistent about the reasoning: a chronograph is an instrument, instruments are used, and a watch built to be used should be able to survive it. The gold version tests that argument harder than the titanium one does, since very few owners will treat a gold bracelet roughly.
This suits a buyer who wants the most complicated thing the sports line offers in the warmest material it comes in. Ruthenium over gold is a combination nobody else uses and it is the reason to choose this dial over the blackened one, since the surface is never quite the same color twice. Weight is substantial and the bracelet does most of the work of managing it. As a discontinued dial variant the questions are condition, bracelet completeness and the state of the rubber inserts, which perish in time and are the part most likely to need replacing. The split-seconds should be tested through several cycles, and the catch-up should be instant rather than lazy. A split hand that arrives a beat late is showing wear in the clamp that holds it, and that work goes back to the manufacture rather than to a local watchmaker. Beyond that the watch asks only to be wound, and the date is the single indication that needs attention through the year. Nothing else on it requires setting at all.
