Audi Q9 and SQ9 in Zion with a Meteorite Watch

The National Park Service dates the rock layers at Zion National Park to between roughly 110 million and 270 million years ago. A team of scientists led by Janne Blichert-Toft, a geochemist and CNRS research director at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, dated the Muonionalusta meteorite at about 4.565 billion years old in a 2010 study. A slice of it makes up the dial of the Maestro 2.0 Meteorite Darkblast, a 39mm steel watch the brand introduced in January 2026 in an edition of 100 pieces. For two days in and around Zion, the watch on my wrist had the surrounding rock beat by about four billion years. I was in state to drive Audi's newest releases, the Q9 and SQ9.

The brand selected the enormity of Utah as a backdrop to debut its largest ever SUV. The Q9 has three rows and is 209 inches long, and it would take 333 of them, parked nose to tail, to fill the 1.1-mile Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel. The biggest difference between the two is under the hood: the Q9 runs a 2.9-liter twin-turbo V6 with 429 hp and 442 lb-ft of torque, enough to get all 5,302 pounds of it to 60 mph in 4.9 seconds, and the SQ9 gets a 591-hp twin-turbo V8 that does it in 3.8 seconds.

Audi built both with American buyers in mind; from the center console designed to fit a Stanley, which Mark Dahncke, Director, Communications at Audi of America, said was one of the requirements, to the tailgate, which now projects a light showing owners where to kick, since otherwise, said Dahncke, people end up dancing behind the car trying to get it open.

Dieter Weidemann, an engineer in the department that sets the targets for how Audis ride and handle, said the cars were meant to feel smaller, lighter and more agile than a driver would expect. "This is something you should try today," he said, and described the test: give the wheel a quick input of about 10 degrees at 70 mph, without leaving the lane, and feel whether the rear axle answers later than the front. "We're talking about milliseconds," he said, and he suggested we run the same test in whatever we drove next.

With rocks that have been around for millennia, time doesn't slow, but it does shift. That morning, test driving two cars and one watch in tandem, I found myself surprised by all.

Gérald Genta founded Gerald Charles in 2000, the last of his houses, and drew the Maestro case somewhere between a square and an octagon, with a curve at 6 o'clock that the brand credits to the 17th-century Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. The Darkblast edition, at $29,800, lays the meteorite over a red aluminum plate that shows through radial cuts in the stone. The red in the watch, it turned out, paired perfectly with the red rocks of Utah. Despite its size, it both wore and read larger on my wrist, a stark contrast to the vehicle, which did not feel like a full-size SUV from behind the wheel.

On a backroad into Zion National Park, where hairpin turns wrapped around Navajo Sandstone and straights unfolded atop igneous rocks, I began to notice how the cars drove beyond the horsepower. The ease with which the heads up display shifted according to seat positioning, the feedback taken from customers on having the seat massagers run as far up and down the lumbar and seat as possible, yes, the cupholders too, often impact buying decisions more than a 0-60mph.

At 6 o'clock, the Maestro's small seconds runs inside explosion rays engraved into the meteorite, a first for a Gerald Charles meteorite watch. The brand rates the automatic GCA2011 movement inside to withstand 5,000 G of shock, so two days of hairpins were no cause for worry, and the whole case is 9mm thick.

The Q9 is the first Audi sold in the U.S. with adaptive driving beams. The system keeps the high-beams on while shaping the light to avoid shining directly at vehicles ahead or oncoming traffic. On a dark, two-lane road, I could see the beams create a moving shadow around other cars while still lighting the surrounding road and terrain. After dark, the Maestro's indexes, filled with Super-LumiNova X1, glowed green against the meteorite.

On the last morning I pulled over en route to the St. George Regional Airport for one more look at the rock, about 270 million years old at its oldest, then went back to looking at my wrist, where the meteorite had it beat by four billion.

Go Do Something is not a paid endorsement. The purpose of the column is to wear a watch through a real experience and see how it holds up. The watch was loaned by Gerald Charles for the purposes of this column.