WATCH ANATOMY
ALL THE GEARS, AND AN IDEA
13th March 2025
Just when you thought road-cycling couldn’t get more gadget-strewn, Tudor is bringing something …genuinely novel, as well as typically utilitarian: a chronograph version of its Pelagos (aka ‘the 21st century’s perfect diving watch’) specifically engineered around the needs of the Giro d’Italia riders of the Swiss watchmaker’s ‘TUDOR Pro Cycling Team’. Words by Alex Doak.
Cleaved from 43mm’s diameter of carbon composite case, with fixed (hence ‘FXD’) strap bars in monobloc – specc’ed recently in titanium at the behest of Tudor’s first-ever pro’ clients, the combat swimmers of Marine Nationale.
The ‘Snowflake’ hand is one of the hallmarks of the TUDOR divers’ watches introduced in 1969, rendered with ultra-modern Grade X1 Swiss-made Super-LumiNova phosphorescent material using strontium aluminate.
A black matt dial with luminescent ceramic composite monobloc applied hour markers means the information presented is readable without distraction.
One-piece technical fabric strap in black, woven in France on 19th-century Jacquard looms by the Julien Faure company in the St-Etienne region: more than up to the sweaty, salty, ham-fisted realities of long-distance cycling.
All functions powered by Tudor’s chronometer-precision Calibre MT5813: a modern marvel of micro-mechanics retro-engineered from Breitling’s in-house ‘B01’ at Kenissi Manufacture, then assembled, QC-ed and distributed next-door, at Tudor’s shiny-red and cutting-edge HQ … a collective hub of horological brilliance in the otherwise sleepy village of Le Locle, high in the Jura mountains.
The cyclist’s tachymeter scale is ‘wrapped’ around the dial in a spiral, allowing the speeds at which cyclists routinely operate to be read at a glance – printed on a 45°-angled ‘rehaut’, or banked ‘flange’. With, say, a TAG Heuer Carrera, you start timing a car as it passes you and stop the timer when it has travelled one mile, and it took 30 seconds, the seconds hand will point to 120 on the tachymeter scale. This indicates that the car was moving at 120mph. With the Cycling Edition, it indicates 24mph.
It’s typical for the circumferential, logarithmic ‘tachymeter’ of a chronograph to be calibrated to the speeds of an automobile, allowing rough speed-distance-time calculations on the fly according to the central sweep-seconds hand. What makes this ‘Tudor Pelagos FXD Chrono Cycling Edition’ special (£4,560) is that the scale is suited to the speeds cyclists sustain.
