Panerai’s Time Keepers: Max Sirena on pressure and precision

Max Sirena sits with his hand to his mouth, eyes distant, the posture of a man calculating years of preparation compressed into seconds of competition. This is the opening image of Panerai’s new Time Keepers series, a five part film project that peels back the relationship between time and the people who navigate it in the high stakes world of America’s Cup racing.

For Sirena, now in his third consecutive America’s Cup campaign as Skipper and Team Director of Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, time operates on multiple registers. Decisions made months, even years in advance shape the boat’s architecture and the crew’s training. Yet on the water, everything distils to fractions of a second. A single tactical choice, a delayed manoeuvre, can decide a race that hinges on margins invisible to the naked eye.

The partnership between Panerai and Luna Rossa runs deep, rooted in a shared understanding of how precision instruments must serve extreme performance. Panerai is Official Sponsor of the Italian challenger for the third consecutive America’s Cup campaign, a relationship built on the watchmaker’s century long heritage of crafting tools for those who work at the limits of human capability. Led by Skipper and Team Director Max Sirena and representing the Circolo della Vela Sicilia for the third time, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli is challenging for the Louis Vuitton 37th America’s Cup onboard an AC75 foiling monohull.

In Time Keepers, Sirena explores this confluence: how vision drives preparation, how pressure sharpens focus, and how the moments that define a race are built upon countless unseen hours. The film captures not just a skipper’s perspective, but a philosophy in which every second counts because the work that precedes it demands nothing less than perfection.

Imagery courtesy of Panerai (@panerai).