Forget Sports Cars, This Seiko Watch Is Inspired by an Adorable Motorcycle

The new timepiece reminds us that the Seiko 5 Sports line is one of the best values around.Photos courtesy SeikoCount on Seiko to deliver one of the year’s most delightful watches in the dead of summer. The brand’s line of 5 Sports models is already one of the best-known hacks for finding timepieces at a great value but it also regularly finds off-beat inspiration. The new Seiko 5 Sports Motocompo Limited Edition is based upon a 1981 collapsible motorcycle from fellow Japanese brand Honda.Watch brands are constantly getting influenced by classic cars, so Seiko looking towards the Motocompo feels particularly fresh—and that’s before you start admiring that vivid yellow dial. The motorcycle was designed to fit within the trunk of the Honda City compact car and weighed just 92 lbs, was powered by a 2.5 HP engine, and featured foldable footrests, handlebars, and bright color schemes. For a young person navigating Japan’s varied urban and countryside landscape, the combination of compact car and bike provided opportunities for exploration that would otherwise have been too expensive and space-consuming. They would have only needed a watch as a ready companion.The new Seiko’s dial features plenty of clever references to the Motocompo. Luckily, it has the vehicle’s bright exterior to drift off with its own sun-yellow dial. A grey band set horizontally across the dial center mirrors the one on the Motocompo and features a framed black day-date display at 3 o’clock with contrasting, cream-colored printing, plus the Honda wordmark in black at 9 o’clock. Even the “Automatic” typography is executed in Motocompo-inspired, block-style script and the red accents matches the central second hand’s arrow-shaped tip. The movement itself, meanwhile, can be glimpsed via a red, semi-transparent caseback featuring a silhouette of the compact Honda motorcycle.The case of the sporty and affordable Seiko 5 Sports line—one of our favorite entry points into watch collecting more broadly—provides the perfect canvas on which to honor the Montocompo’s idiosyncrasies. Housed in a black-coated stainless steel case, it measures a relatively compact 36.4mm in diameter and 12.5mm tall—perfect for wrists of all sizes. A Hardlex crystal both injects some vintage inspiration and keeps costs down, while the crown is inspired by the motorcycle’s fuel cock and features the word “Turn.” Even the slate-grey NATO-style strap carries Motocompo influence: look carefully and you’ll see the text “Carrying Point” on the hardware and “Insertion Point” on the strap tip, echoing the instructions found on the compact motorcycle itself.Water-resistant to 100m and featuring 41 hours of power reserve, the HDB010 is a perfectly adventure field watch whose cool design—including a neat box designed to mirror the original Motocompo shipping container—makes it extra-appealing to collectors. The only trouble? It won’t be available until September. But if you can sit on roughly $500 and wait it out, you might just nab yourself the ultimate fall moto timepiece…and the perfect summer watch of 2027.Oren Hartov is a GQ contributor covering all things horological. He’s written extensively about celebrity watch culture, waxed poetic about the GMT complication, and railed against case sizes larger than 40mm. A graduate of the Berklee College of Music and a military veteran, he can be found playing the guitar, ... Read More