Cool dial, warm case, and a chronograph sitting in between: this is the least obvious of the Octa Chronographe executions and quite possibly the most quietly successful of them. F.P. Journe paired a white gold plate with whitened guilloche silver subdials and then put the whole assembly inside a case of 18K 6N gold, so the exterior is the reddest metal he works in and the face is among the coolest. The alternative, which is a 5N gold dial in the very same case, agrees with itself entirely; this one does not, and it is a good deal better for the disagreement. The watch is a flyback chronograph with a sixty-minute counter and a large date, offered at 38 mm and 40 mm, and Journe built the reference only from 2004 to 2008 before withdrawing it from the collection altogether.
The three subdials are the structural event on this dial, and the way they have been attached matters. Each one of them is cut separately in guilloche silver and then screwed onto the gold plate beneath it with a steel circle, so that the counters sit slightly proud of the face and are bounded by a hard bright ring of metal. On a white gold plate the effect is one cool surface sitting on another, separated by texture and by the bright steel rather than by any difference in color, which is a considerably subtler arrangement than the 5N version manages and needs rather better light to appreciate properly. The fixing screws are left plainly visible, exactly as they are right across the rest of the manufacture's work. At 38 mm this is a dense face and at 40 mm it opens out considerably, and unlike the simpler Octa references the difference here is substantial, because a chronograph dial has to carry three subdials, a date aperture and several hands that must all be told apart from one another at a glance. The case is 10.6 mm tall with a sapphire crystal in the back, through which the rose gold movement supplies a third distinct metal to a watch already carrying two.
A chronograph draws real power whenever it runs, and a 120-hour reserve on a watch like this one is doing rather more work than the same figure would on a time-only piece. Engaging a chronograph couples an entire second gear train onto the going train, and everything that second train drives, the sweeping seconds hand and the minute counter stepping round once every sixty seconds, has to be powered by the very same mainspring that is already keeping the watch running. The immediate consequence of that is a drop in amplitude at the balance, which on a poorly executed chronograph shows up straightforwardly as a change in rate whenever the mechanism is engaged. The mitigation for all of that is torque: a barrel large enough that the additional load represents a small fraction of what it is already delivering rather than a significant proportion of it. Journe's five-day barrel was built in the first place for autonomy, and it turns out to serve this second purpose equally well, which is precisely why the published reserve figure still holds at 120 hours here. The calibre 1300.3 runs to 254 parts and 32 jewels at 21,600 alternations per hour on plates and bridges of solid 18K rose gold, wound by the off-center 22K gold rotor the whole family shares.
Three separate chronographs exist within this catalog, and no two of them set out to solve quite the same problem in quite the same way. The Octa Chronographe is the automatic one of the three, built directly onto the existing Octa architecture with a flyback function and a sixty-minute counter, and it is comfortably the most conventional of them by some considerable distance. The Centigraphe measures right down to a hundredth of a second, which required an entirely separate mainspring barrel dedicated to the chronograph alone, so that the timing function could not rob the going train of anything whatsoever. The Chronographe Rattrapante instead adds a split-seconds function, which means two superimposed chronograph hands, one of which can be stopped independently and then caught back up to the other on demand. Each of the three represents a genuinely different answer to the underlying question of how a chronograph ought to relate to the watch that is carrying it, and the Octa Chronographe is the one that answers by integration rather than by separation. It is also the only one of the three that you would simply put on in the morning and wear all day without thinking about it at all.
This is the Octa Chronographe for somebody who finds the all-gold version rather too warm and the platinum one rather too cold. A red gold case carrying a white gold dial gives the watch two distinct registers at once, and the effect is considerably more interesting on the wrist than either of the matched executions manages. It is also the rarer of the two dials that were ever offered in a gold case, which is worth knowing before starting a search. The reference ran for only four years and has been out of production since 2008, so surviving examples are genuinely scarce by comparison with either the Calendrier or the Automatique Reserve alongside it. Buying one of them, exercise the chronograph fully: start it, stop it, reset it and confirm that the hands return exactly to zero, then engage the flyback from a running start and check that the reset and the restart happen together in one clean action. Watch the running seconds hand very closely for any hesitation at the moment the chronograph engages, and have the full service history confirmed with the manufacture rather than with any independent workshop.
