Is this new monopusher from IWC Schaffhausen the horological equivalent of those car door handles that only pop out when you get really close? At a glance, something is obviously missing: the sine qua non of a chronograph are its pushers, usually extruding from the case at two and four o’clock. IWC takes advantage of using a monopusher movement (meaning only one pusher is needed for all functions – see our chronograph guide) and conceals that single control in the extremely large winding crown. It’s not the first watch to pull this trick, but here it’s so smoothly concealed as to elicit a genuine double-take.

Not so much a case of “where are the pushers?” as “why are they over there?” When your signature design includes a substantial crown guard on the right hand side of the case, as the Luminor famously does, it forces you to think twice about how to introduce a chronograph mechanism. Panerai could have gone for a “bullhead”, where the chronograph pushers sit at 11 and one o’clock like the horns of a bull, but instead opted to flip the movement through 180 degrees and have them on the other side. Great for lefties, of course.

Carbon fibre, particularly on high-performance cars, isn’t such a new thing these days. Indeed, the criss-cross weave of a Lamborghini spoiler on your watch is about as stylish as monogrammed shirt collars and pointy shoes. But forged carbon – as seen in the Bamford B347 – is a different story. It shares all the physical advantages (scratch-proof, lightweight, low maintenance), but brings an understated, organic, camouflaged feel to the design. Bamford Watch Department contrasts it nicely with the gloss finish on the pusher and clean block colours of the dial. And offers the whole thing at a fraction of the cost of a carbon-cased chrono from a decade ago.

Another chronograph that somewhat disguises its intentions, Cartier’s Santos pulls off a little of what both IWC and Panerai are up to. Yes, it’s another monopusher (they do make it easier to go off-piste) with its single button positioned on the left hand side of the case. It’s set up so that at a glance, it looks just like a symmetrical flourish to balance out the crown on the right. Then you realise that it also has a purpose. For all that you don’t immediately think of Cartier when you think chronographs, it always executes them with style.

Mr Nicolas Rieussec isn’t a name learnt by schoolchildren around the world, but he is known to watch geeks as the inventor of a very early form of chronograph – a device that used drops of ink on rotating mechanical discs to measure the outcome of horse races. Montblanc’s watch pays tribute by engineering its chronograph subdials to spin round while the hands stay fixed, the opposite of any other watch’s approach. And if you think about the relative sizes of what’s spinning, clearly quite a bit harder to control.