Hemel is one of the stalwarts of the microbrand community. I say community, not market, because the brand’s founder and owner, Marvin Menke, is also very active in curating online microband enthusiast groups. In the 7 or so years since I’ve followed microbrands, Hemel has produced military-inspired watches known for their high-quality construction and attractive designs. The brand’s newest model, the Sky Racer, continues that trend in an all-new platform.
Chronographs have long been the backbone of Hemel’s lineup – the HF20 was the first Hemel I came across several years ago, and serves as an older sibling for the Sky Racer. In 2020, Hemel expanded its chronograph range with a special edition for the League of Microbrands group, dubbed the Air League Chronograph. Like the HF20, the Air League Chrono utilized a traditional rounded case with pump pushers, echoing pilots’ watches from the mid-20th century. The Air League platform became so popular that Hemel put the model into regular production and launched several iterations over the past five years.
Those iterations offered enough in the way of new design to avoid feeling stale, but I felt that Hemel had such a popular offering that it might trap the entire brand into being synonymous with only one of their models. Fortunately, Marvin Menke is not a person I believe to be familiar with the idiom “resting upon your laurels,” and with the new Sky Racer, he has given Hemel a breath of fresh air.
The Sky Racer is available in both automatic and mechanical forms, although the former is a limited edition model created for the League of Microbrands group. It is also mostly sold out, and at the time of writing, the only automatic version still available for purchase is the Gulf-inspired “Classic Blue Livery”-not a bad option to be left with. As the automatic version varies little from the mechanical version in terms of movement, overall thickness, and price, my review will focus mainly on the regular-production mechanical version. If you find an automatic movement worth an additional $150, 2mm of thickness, and a ghost-date position for the crown, everything else that you read about the mechanical Sky Racer translates to its automatic sibling.
As with all of Hemel’s chronos, the Sky Racer features a bi-compax layout, with a running seconds subdial at 9 and a 30-minute counter at 3. Those registers are the nadir of the dial’s depth, nested below a concentrically-segmented main plate. The color and depth contrast of the subdials to the main dial plate are familiar chronograph design tricks, executed well with exceptionally crisp printing and clean edging. The large, inner portion of the main dial houses the primary timekeeping scale, which utilizes a dual-numeral format at 5-minute intervals, typically seen on Type B flieger watches. It’s a nice on-theme touch conveyed with a very attractive font that draws your eye to the markers without cluttering the dial. Syringe hour and minute hands track the local time, and an arrow hand tracks the chronograph seconds. The Full Lume White variant gets black-painted hour and minute hands, and an orange seconds hand, while all other colorways have polished metal central hands.
As you may have guessed, the central portion of the Full Lume White colorway is lumed, with lumed hands on the black subdials. The arrangement is similar on the Classic Blue Livery, without the lumed central portion of the dial. The remaining versions – Midnight Black, Raceway Green, Navy Blue Livery – invert this arrangement with lumed white subdials. Counter to what you might expect, this makes the lumed-dial version less functionally legible in low light, as you cannot read the subdials. The full-lume dial is a cool design effect, though, and how frequently does one actually need to time up to 30 minutes in the dark?
On most of the Sky Racers, the outer ring of the dial houses a scale that measures tenths of a minute, a pilot-friendly feature for tracking flight times, distance travelled, and fuel usage – all things that one would want to easily read while airborne. On the automatic Classic Blue Livery Sky Racer, the outer ring houses a more common tachymeter scale. For the Full Lume White and Classic Blue Livery variants, this outer ring has white text on a bold orange background, which provides visual vibrance and nicely frames the inner portion of the dial. Unfortunately, the white-on-orange color scheme makes the scales difficult to read. For the navy, black, and green Sky Racer colorways, both mechanical and automatic, the scales are rendered in black text on a white background, which should be more legible.
The Sky Racer’s case is all new for the Hemel lineup and shows up with a strong presence. The mechanical version measures 43mm x 14mm x 49mm, and the automatic adds 2mm to the overall height. The Sky Racer wears surprisingly well, as the 49mm lug-to-lug span is fairly short for a 43mm wide watch, though the automatic version feels a bit ungainly on account of its thickness. For a watch this thick, even the thinner 14mm height of the mechanical version, 50m of water resistance is surprisingly low. The Sky Racer, as the name suggests, isn’t intended for sub-aquatic adventure, but the similarly aviation-themed Air League Chrono was 13.4mm thick and had 100m of water resistance.
The cushion case and arched lugs are evocative of Panerai, but with subtle touches that move the design beyond direct homage territory. In particular, the broad, polished chamfers that surround the upper surface of the case are a distinct facet that accent the squircle case’s outer limits. The limited surface area above those chamfers is lightly radially brushed, while the case flanks below are heavily vertically brushed, with crisp transitions all around. The lugs are polished on top and brushed on their sides to echo the finishing of the case, and their 20mm span further accentuates the Sky Racer’s broad-shouldered stance.
The strap that comes affixed to those lugs is a respectable quality, padded leather affair that is very stiff out of the box. It’ll loosen up over time, but I lacked such patience with my limited hands-on review time. I happen to have a rubber rally strap that perfectly fits the Sky Racer’s theme that I didn’t remove until packing the review samples for return shipment. With 20mm lugs, you have a boundless variety to form your own preferred pairing.
Mounted atop the case is a 120-click rotating bezel with a ceramic, fully graduated and lumed countdown-timing insert. Bezel action is firm and precise, though still easy to rotate while wearing gloves, should you desire to lean heavily into the Sky Racer’s vintage aviation theme. The BGW9 lume on the bezel glows consistently with the lumed hands and dial, whether full-lume or indices only.
The right side of the case houses the time-keeping engagement points, with a round crown and two great-looking trapezoidal chronograph pushers. On the Full Lume White and Classic Blue Livery models, the upper pusher that starts and stops the chronograph complication is coated in a shiny burnt orange, while the other colorways get a more subdued matching polished steel set of pushers. The engagement of the pushers on the automatic version was heavy and snappy, while the mechanical version was lighter and less precise. Everything functioned fine on the latter; it just didn’t have the same positive engagement as the automatic movement.
The crown, common across mechanical and automatic versions, is thin, but broad – a good combination that enables easy winding of the movements without digging into the wrist. This is a notable improvement from the Air League Chrono, which had a thin and narrow crown that made winding the mechanical movement a challenge. The end of the crown has a debossed, matte-finished recessed area that frames Hemel’s polished H logo.
On the receiving end of the crown and pushers’ inputs are the well-known Seagull ST19 (mechanical Sky Racers), and the lesser-known Peacock SL4617 (automatic). The Peacock is a clone (Hemel’s own terminology on the product page) of the Valjoux 7750, and provided it is a well-executed clone, it should be serviceable by anyone who can maintain or repair a 7750. As I am fairly unfamiliar with the SL4617, I cannot attest to its reliability over time. Conversely, I’m very familiar with the ST19, and trust Hemel’s selection of quality examples, having owned an ST19-powered Hemel for years with no fault. Both movements are visible through the Sky Racer’s caseback, though the ST19 is the one worthy of being looked at.
The Sky Racer advances Hemel’s recent trend of watches that look familiar, but are not referential of a single historic model. As a total package, I am partial to the Air League Chrono and its successors, but the Sky Racer is a bold, firmly-landed step into new territory. There is some area for improvement, specifically the thickness and water resistance, but the complete offer is still compelling. As with the Air League and its successors, the Sky Racer is a great footprint for continued iteration and another successful design for Hemel.
The Hemel Sky Racer is available at Hemel’s website. The Mechanical version retails for $549.99, and the automatic for $699.99.
