Rolex’s Cosmograph Daytona
Timothy Barber traces the history of the legendary Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, now available in two highly collectable new versions
Within the landscape of Swiss wristwatches, the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona holds a unique allure: shrouded in romance and collector folklore, but flush with such a sense of pure, masculine cool – and so maddeningly hard to get hold of – that in terms of desirability, it’s untouchable.
Two new versions being released this year, the first upgrades to the basic steel model since 2000, change only minor details, but still had collectors frothing with excitement when unveiled in March. Two people I know called their authorised dealers within an hour of the announcement to make sure their names were on the list to buy one. But even though the Daytona is far from the most expensive or refined watch Rolex makes, it is one of the rarest. And those collectors are likely in for a long wait.
The Cosmograph Daytona is everything a chronograph, a wristwatch with a stopwatch function, should be – robust, clear, balanced and classic, and tremendously engineered. It is the archetype of Rolex excellence, but also the embodiment of the brand’s very particular quirks. Certain vintage models go for well into six figures, the difference between US$50,000 and US$250,000 being often minor dial differences that were meaningless at the time – a line of text here, some different coloured markings there – and defy every law of what should dictate value.
Funny to think the Daytona was, for its first 25 years, more or less a flop. It was born in 1963, when Rolex revisited a name it had previously used for a short-lived moon-phase watch, “Cosmograph”, and applied it to its sporty new chronograph.
Until the 1960s, chronographs had a more delicate, classical appearance; they measured everything from the distance of artillery fire to the pulse of a patient. In the sixties they became associated with motorsports, worn by racing drivers and other glamorous types, and became more robust and engineered. Sponsorship of the NASCAR speedway at Daytona Beach, Florida, eventually added the second word to the dial, and the watch’s mystique remains absolutely tied to that world.
Essentially a racing stopwatch for the wrist, it has sub-registers for recording minutes and hours and a central hand for timing elapsed seconds. Its defining identifier is the tachometric scale, designed for measuring speed over a given distance engraved on the thick bezel. The 40mm span was huge in 1963, if relatively small for a chronograph now; what’s
remarkable is how not just the size, but the overall essentials of the Daytona’s design have remained constant for 53 years.
Its fortunes have fluctuated rather more widely. In the early 1960s, the Daytona didn’t seem to fit into the Rolex domain. It was handwound, while Rolex was the driving force behind automatically wound watches. It didn’t even have a Rolex-made movement, as making a chronograph was, until recently, a specialist job – it used the same engine as many other, cheaper, sports watches. And it wasn’t waterproof, yet Rolex invented the watertight Oyster case back in 1926.
It never caught on widely, even after water resistance was added. In the era of quartz watches from the 1970s to the 1980s, this hand-wound legacy watch was an anachronism, and by the mid-1980s, Rolex had quietly stopped producing it. But, then, among certain lovers of older watches, the Daytona started becoming fashionable. In the late 1980s, as Swiss watchmaking started the fight-back against the quartz revolution, Rolex thrust it back into production, with an automatic movement. The Daytona started benefiting from the glamorous associations that had kept it in an obscure niche in the past, and its stark handsomeness began to be appreciated. Prices started rising. The brilliance of Rolex’s strategy since has been to cash in not on the watch’s popularity but its ever-growing mystique. Since 2000, it has carried a high-spec in-house movement, while precious-metal versions have been rolled out. But the “pure” steel version was unchanged until now. The new editions reintroduce a black bezel made from scratchproof ceramic, and black surrounds for the sub-registers on the white dial version. The changes give the watch a more tangible essence of its historic appearance, and a more handsome and sporty look than any since the 1980s. Waiting lists can be between six months and two years, although the clamour for the new iterations will undoubtedly lengthen that considerably.