The Fourth Wheel, Issue 99

Rolex, Tudor and Patek Philippe reaction, plus other thoughts on Watches and Wonders

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that cannot believe it is about to hit triple figures. I’ll save the gushing thank-yous for next week but it is fantastic to have come this far. Every tenth issue of The Fourth Wheel is an AMA - Ask Me Anything - and next week will be no different (although there will also be some special announcements!). So please, send me your burning questions. They can be related to what we saw at Watches and Wonders, or completely separate. Preferably keep it horological, but you know what, I’ll answer most things. You know the drill by now - reply to this email, DM me on Instagram, post it on this thread, it’s all good.

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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

Revolution At Bremont
Roger Smith on British Watchmaking
Where Are All The Risk-Takers?
The Dying Art Of The CEO Interview

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So. I thought I’d post some reflections on Watches and Wonders. Bremont was the biggest story - and it rumbled on to the end of the week, courtesy of a clumsy attempt by co-founders Nick and Giles English to steady the ship, with matching Instagram posts urging people to stay their judgement until they see the new watches in real life¹. A display of unity between Bremont past and present would have made good sense, if it had come on day one of the fair, didn’t sound like the brothers were reading a script at gunpoint telling their families they were absolutely loving this holiday camp with all the barbed wire and gruel. And had the comments section turned on.

But let’s move on. I thought Rolex’s releases were particularly unspectacular, by their standards or anyone else’s. The black and grey GMT-Master II is nice but all GMT-Master IIs are nice on Jubilee bracelets. Nobody mourns the Yacht-Master II. The Sea-Dweller in yellow gold didn’t do anything for me, not even as a post-modern, post-ironic statement on desk divers or late stage capitalism or, well, anything else. It’s just an extremely large, heavy, vulgar watch that looks like something Dan Bilzerian would wear purely to show that he could afford it. The platinum 1908 was nice enough but expensive, although complaining about price at any level these days is a completely redundant exercise. I was interested to hear Rolex’s UK rep say that the ‘guilloché’ dial is done entirely by machine, i.e. not hand-turned; she didn’t elaborate but this conflicts with what other outlets are reporting. Maybe there is some confusion or miscommunication over what ‘machine’ means in this context but in general, the industry is abusing the word guilloché left, right and centre. Tudor was at it as well - it’s not on the website or in the press releases but in the cringeworthy video they showed to press (wherein a watch ‘spoke’ to us in the first person, all ‘cool vibes’ and ‘sick manufacture, dude’) it made reference to a guilloché dial on the Clair de Rose, so I am hereby starting the campaign to make ‘guilloché’ a protected term, like Champagne or Parmesan cheese, whereby you have to hand-machine a dial using a traditional rose engine to be allowed to use the word. Otherwise it should be called ‘geometrically engraved’ or some other own-brand equivalent.

Rolex did show some new Day-Dates with gradient dials which were pretty good, and a whole load of gem-set Daytonas which… well I can only second the words of Horology Ancienne on Instagram when they wrote that the brilliant-cut bezels look like aftermarket jobs. Baguettes or nothing, boys!

Speaking of Tudor… the BB58 GMT is a smart move, and anyone griping about the gilt should just sit tight; there is a zero per cent chance that we won’t see every conceivable version of this reference over the next 7-8 years. The Black Bay monochrome is safe and sensible and still excellent next to the competition, and the gold one, well it makes about as much sense as anything else. At least it’s a wearable size. Tudor’s expansion of its METAS certification across the range - as SJX writes - is further evidence that at its price, Tudor really cannot be beaten.

I was left cold by most of what Patek Philippe showed; the 5330G made my top ten list last week, but the denim Nautilus failed to stir my soul and the quartz Aquanaut dual time 5269R may actually have made my soul even less animated than its resting baseline. The Golden Ellipse is undoubtedly a la moment and will be glowingly received in magazines the world over, but it’s just one watch. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the way the brand does things: there’s always a little of everything rather than one overarching narrative, as you’ll often find at other brands. This is smart, because it spreads the risk around and means there’s something for everyone, but it dilutes any sense that Patek Philippe is committed to a revival of glam, indulgent disco-era watches. Probably because it isn’t, and we should all remember that when we’re writing about the Ellipse.

I am more convinced than before that Patek is holding back its best watches. Remember in 2022 it showed an absolutely brilliant chronograph less than a month after W&W ended? I think the Cubitus, or whatever it might be called, will be the big moment of the year, and we can expect it to launch in September/October.

The new Aquanaut 5146G, water-resistant to 30m

There’s one more Patek-related topic of conversation, and it relates to that old hand-grenade, water-resistance. Mark Kauzlarich covered it for Hodinkee here, and the comments section is ablaze with righteous argument. Not sure what the deal is? Patek Philippe announced in a press release that it is changing its water-resistance (WR) ratings from 120m for Nautilus and Aquanaut to 30m but that it is also changing what a 30m WR rating actually means. Or trying to. It now says that if its watches say ‘30m’, that means they have been over-pressure tested to 3ATM of pressure (over-pressure testing usually means +25 per cent, so an actual pressure of 4ATM for peace of mind), and says that you can swim, shower, do the dishes and actually dive 30m under the waves wearing a Nautilus or Aquanaut etc. Why is this so confusing?