Hands-On: The Tudor Pelagos FXD ‘Cycling Edition’
Over the past year or so, Tudor has been on a tear, taking their growing stable of sports sponsorships (or even informal relationships) and turning them into interesting and surprising models. Some are as simple as dial color changes – even if they are very unusual ones like the pink Black Bay Chronograph slightly inspired by Inter Miami – and some are more purpose-built. The new Pelagos FXD Chrono “Cycling Edition” certainly falls in the latter camp.
In theory, this is a purpose-built tool for cyclists wanting a mechanical watch. Whether or not that person actually exists is a matter of some debate among serious cyclists I informally polled. It’s also kind of beside the point for me. I’m an avowed fan of blacked-out cases. If I had the money to buy more than one in my life, I’d totally pull a Karl Lagerfeld and PVD a “Jumbo” Royal Oak. So, my interest in this new “Cycling Edition” from Tudor was largely based on that metric alone. But I also hadn’t seen any Pelagos FXD in person, let alone a new FXD Chrono.
Let’s get this out of the way: I know how to ride a bike. Don’t let the fact that a bike (or helmet, cycling shoes, cycling jersey, cycling gloves, tire patches, etc., etc., etc.) doesn’t appear in this story fool you. I can ride a bike. I promise. In fact, I had a brief obsession with cycling in college when I even went so far as taking apart my dad’s old chromoly steel bike (appropriately sized for my giant self) one winter before rebuilding it after a full cleaning. But cycling and being a broke college student didn’t go well together – I couldn’t afford a real racing bike to take the hobby seriously. So obviously it’s great I picked a much more affordable hobby like watches.
It’s been just over a year since Tudor launched the first-ever carbon fiber watch from either that brand or Rolex and so far, the case material has been a platform for sport-specific designs aligned with teams Tudor sponsors. The first were two watches – time only and chronograph – for the America’s Cup racing team Alinghi Red Bull Racing. And yet, color me a little surprised that the chronograph, at the very least, didn’t have a “yacht timer” chronograph register layout at three o’clock to count down to the start of the start of the race.
While the Alinghi watches played off the red and blue colors of the Red Bull team, the new “Cycling Edition” has the colors of the Tudor Pro Cycling team – red and black. The team has its own watch, a chronograph we’ve covered twice on the site (number one and number two), with great photos like the one from Zachary Piña below. That watch was a traditional Black Bay Chronograph in black coated steel with a 41mm case. It had other touches that made it different from the watch I shot: screw-down pushers, red around the subdials, a white date, a tachymeter bezel, and a red Tudor crest. It was also only available to Tudor Pro Cycling team members.
The new carbon-composite-cased Pelagos FXD “Cycling Edition” veers in a completely different direction than just being a dial and case color change. The carbon case has a more practical impact on wearability, so I’ll cover that at the end, but several other details make this – in theory at least – a more practical watch for a cyclist.
First of all, you do still have a very blacked-out design with a matte dial for increased legibility, with those red accents around the dial helping to accentuate the running seconds at nine o’clock and the 45-minute counter at three o’clock. The watch – like all Pelagos FXD models – also features square hour markers that match the “snowflake” hour hand. This has been something that has bothered me a little about my beloved Black Bay 58; if it has snowflake hands, it probably should have square markers. Round markers match better with “Mercedes” hands. That’s how it went with vintage Tudors and probably would be better to go back that way.
The case design is – unsurprisingly – the somewhat strange, somewhat charming FXD-style case with fixed bars between the lugs that accommodate the single pass-through fabric strap included with the watch. The fact that this is a carbon composite case is surprising even when you look at it up close. Most people – myself included – would expect some grained, lattice texture, interwoven pattern, striations, or marbling in a carbon case, but that’s not so. When you view it from a side angle, you can see a bit of texture, but not as much as on something like the carbon fiber watches Hodinkee did with Unimatic. Instead, the case looks like a coated metal, with all the sharp edges and chamfering you’d expect.
While the watch has a screw-down crown, the water resistance has been halved compared to the Alinghi Pelagos FXD Chrono, from 200m to 100m on the “Cycling Edition.” Tudor has also removed the word “Pelagos” from the dial, probably in part because of that change in water resistance, if I had to guess. While underwater cycling is (apparently) a thing, it makes sense that a “Cycling Edition” wouldn’t need the most water resistance. Like the Alinghi watch, this one also doesn’t have screw-down pushers, so while you wouldn’t be likely to try, you don’t want to mess around timing anything with the chronograph underwater.
The most practical change, however, from both the Alinghi watch and the cycling team’s Black Bay Chronograph, is what Tudor have done with the bezel and rehaut. The bezel, made of titanium, is fixed, with an elapsed time scale in carbon. Where things get really interesting is the rehaut between the dial and bezel.
Tudor calls this a cyclist-specific tachymeter scale. While most tachymeter scales list times far more useful to folks timing a hot lap or calculating their speed over a mile or kilometer, Tudor didn’t think that would be the best application for cyclists. After all, a standard tachymeter couldn’t be easily used to time an object traveling for more than 60 seconds. Plus, if you’d use a standard tachymeter to time a cyclist covering 1 mile any faster than 60 seconds, you’re probably heading down the Côte de la Comella in the Tour de France. So how do you make a tachymeter more useable? Just extend it.
This is what the hyperbolic tachymeter scale (based on the calculation y=3600/x, where x is time and and y is the resulting speed) would look like if you don’t worry about the first 15 seconds of the scale and focus on every speed after that point. This was more common on old “snail dial” chronographs back in the days when things (including cars) moved a lot slower. But instead of placing the scale in the center of the dial, Tudor put it on the rehaut.
An Eberhard Pre-Extrafort with “snail dial.” Photo: courtesy Caso Watches
Sure, it’s cleaner and more modern (and the idea of Tudor making a snail dial chronograph in 2024 is completely outlandish) but I have to wonder if the new design is super useful to a cyclist. Sure, the scale extending past a minute certainly makes practical sense. But if you look at the watch below, imagine it on your wrist, and you had been riding for 1 minute and 23 seconds to cover a mile, could you read your speed at a glance while hurtling down the road? I’m a bit dubious. Putting aside whether a cyclist would use the watch this way while riding, the scale is very crowded, and I found it hard to read while sitting still. What’s the solution? I’m not sure. But add to that fact that the pushers felt pretty stiff and might be hard to activate while riding, this chronograph seems far more helpful to a coach timing laps in a velodrome than someone in the heat of training for a breakaway from the peloton.
The fact that the watch only has a 45 minute counter at three o’clock is another potential issue for cyclists. Unless you’re racing in a criterium, that length of time doesn’t feel practical for a cyclist, and even in that case you won’t have time to start and stop a chronograph.
Now, that’s not the only thing I would have changed if I could tweak the “Cycling Edition.” If you like a date, you’re in luck, but I haven’t loved the date on the Caliber MT5813 movement (based on the Breitling B01). Just because the watch can accommodate a date doesn’t mean it has to. From this watch to the Black Bay Chronograph, I think all of them would look better without the date at six o’clock. But it is unobtrusively placed, and the color-matched black date disc helps it fade away. It’s also an otherwise great movement; it’s COSC-certified, automatic, and has 70 hours of power reserve.
The watch features a solid titanium caseback and black metal pin-buckle. The use of some metal components like these means that it has a bit more heft than you might expect from a carbon-composite watch, but not in a bad way. I have found that carbon (and other ultralight material) can sometimes feel a bit flimsy or cheap even if they’re not. There’s also the possibility that that simple feelings like rotor movement will telegraph through the case in a way that feels a bit cheap. This felt anything but. The watch is remarkably light (literally, some friends I showed it to over drinks all remarked at how light it was) but solid. How it would handle a nearly guaranteed tumble from any serious cyclist, I don’t know, but at least it wouldn’t weigh folks down too much.
Look, I’m not counting grams for performance purposes, and god knows if I were, I’d start with my frame instead of my bike’s. But if that’s your thing, the watch weighs 71 grams, including the strap and buckle. That’s not ultra-light nor particularly heavy – it’s the Goldilocks “just right” kind of weight. More than the weight, I was worried that the unusual fixed bar design might fit strangely, digging into my wrist or riding high (a concern when the case is already 13.2mm thick), but it just didn’t. It ended up fading off into a forgetfully comfortable experience in the best way.
Who am I – a non-cyclist – to tell someone who lives their life in intervals, watts, and the like whether or not this new “Cycling Edition” from Tudor is a good watch for life doing hill climbs or Central Park loops? After all, this has always been the comical thing to me about reviewing dive watches out of the water. For all my criticisms, they’re all hypothetical. I’ll leave it up to the cyclists to tell me whether I’m right. But that’s where most of these purpose-built tools get used anyway: on a wrist somewhere other than the place it was designed for. So that’s where I will leave my take: as a non-cyclist who got to wear this watch for a while.
The new Tudor Pelagos FXD Chrono “Cycling Edition” is frankly a cool enough watch that it doesn’t need to be used for its titular purpose. A blacked out chronograph in an interesting case material from a big brand like Tudor is still an interesting enough watch that it deserves attention. It’s also a symbol of Tudor of the future as a forward-thinking horological and R&D complement to Rolex, not a more affordable or vintage-inspired little sibling brand. Tudor was the first of the two brands to do a watch in titanium, but Rolex followed suit eventually. Who knows, maybe this is the sign of things to come at the Crown, not just a novelty from the Shield.
Tudor Pelagos FXD Chrono “Cycling Edition,” ref. M25827KN-0001. 43mm wide by 13.2mm black carbon composite case with a matte finish, with 100m water resistance. Matte black dial, red accents on the chronograph counters, and specialized slow tachymeter scale. Fixed 60-minute bezel. Hours, minutes, running seconds, chronograph, 45-minute chronograph counter. COSC-Certified Manufacture Calibre MT5813 movement based on the Breitling B01. Self-winding with 70 hours of power reserve. Single-piece black fabric strap. Price: $5,275.
Hodinkee
