BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
Do you remember when the Zenith Chronomaster Sport first appeared on the scene? What a fuss that kicked up. I got to have a go with one for two weeks and was pleased overall. The bracelet and clasp left a little to be desired, but the watch head itself looked and felt great.
Oh, and the comments lit up as we expected. You see, at the time, the Chronomaster Sport was causing waves in the watch community because some claimed it looked a little too much like a Rolex Daytona. I’m not overly fussed by this, and I doubt Rolex cares either, but you lot did.
As I expected although forgot to put it in writing so as to mark out my thoughts, the backlash over this design has well and truly settled now, allowing things to return to somewhat normal and for Zenith to get on with making new variants of the Chronomaster Sport. We’ve seen some new metals (I saw the solid gold one in London recently and it looked excellent) and a few different dial colours coming out as well.
The newest model to release comes with an elegant blue sunburst dial with classical coloured subdials, a feature of Zenith watches. As with my review model, there’s plenty going on here with textures, finishes, lume, and the applied Zenith star logo, which looks classy & sophisticated. Further, let us rejoice in the fact that Zenith colour-matched the date window on this piece, something so many other brands outright refuse to do.
Behind the dial is the self-winding calibre El Primero 3600. With a 5Hz beat rate, column wheel chronograph, a high speed (10 second) chronograph seconds hand, hacking seconds and a quickset date, it’s all you could ever need from a watch movement, and you get to see it through an open caseback, too.
The case of the watch is 41mm across and around 13.5mm in thickness, it’s crafted from stainless steel and if memory serves correctly it has a lot of polishing to class the joint up. There is a stainless steel bracelet too. Also present is a stainless steel tachymeter bezel; the black ceramic one looked great but was definitely a contributor to the Chronomaster controversy.
This new model is a core part of Zenith’s collection, meaning it’s not a limited edition piece, and is on sale now for CHF10,400.
