Rolex Daytona: A Comprehensive Guide to the Iconic Racing Chronograph

The Rolex Daytona is today one of the most coveted and collectible luxury watches in the world, and indisputably a legend among racing-inspired chronograph wristwatches. But it was far from an overnight success. Read on to discover how the Rolex Daytona went from languishing on retailers’ shelves in the early 1960s to inspiring years-long waiting lists and stratospheric auction prices in the 21st Century, and how some racetrack cred and Hollywood star power lent a hand along the way.

Since its founding in 1905, Rolex has grown to become the world’s undisputed king of luxury sport watches and one of the most influential innovators in watchmaking history. Rolex inventions like the waterproof Oyster case, the self-winding Perpetual movement, and the user-friendly magnifying Cyclops lens have had widespread influence in the watch industry, and iconic watch models like the Explorer, Submariner and GMT-Master have become the standards against which others in their category are measured. All that said, Rolex was relatively late to the game when it comes to one of the most popular sport-watch fields: the chronograph. By the early 1950s, the decade in which all three of the aforementioned Rolex models debuted, competitors like Breitling, Longines, and Heuer (today’s TAG Heuer), all of whom had established themselves as specialists in chronographs since before the 20th Century, were dominant in the space. Rolex had dabbled with chronograph models intermittently since 1937, but none had achieved much success or been particularly memorable.

Forerunner of Legends: Rolex Chronograph “Pre-Daytonas”

In 1955, however, on the heels of the successful launches of the Submariner, GMT-Master, and Explorer and perhaps feeling confident in the wake of those models’ success, Rolex launched its first “modern” chronograph wristwatch, Ref. 6234, which is now enshrined in legend as the first “pre-Daytona.” The text on its three-register dial read simply “Chronograph” rather than the now-familiar “Cosmograph” and the word “Daytona” was nowhere to be found. It was a 36mm steel watch, outfitted with a manually wound Valjoux 72 caliber, and featured both a tachymeter and telemeter scale on its dial’s flange. The market response at the time was underwhelming — for the Ref. 6234 as well as its successor in the “pre-Daytona” range, Ref. 6238, a more streamlined watch that eliminated the telemeter scale and added sportier baton hands, which followed in 1962. Both these models were made in very low numbers, a consequence of low demand for them, and are thus very valuable on the secondary market today. 

The next generation of Rolex’s chronograph watch would draw inspiration from the brand’s historical association with motorsports, which began with British journalist and racing driver Sir Malcolm Campbell (above), who famously wore a Rolex watch while setting the world land speed record in 1935 in his Campbell-Railton Bluebird on the hard-packed sand track of Florida’s Daytona Beach. Campbell, whose laudatory letters to the company were used in contemporary ads, became one of Rolex’s first “testimonees,” aka compensated brand endorsers, and Daytona Beach, where the Englishman went on to break five overall speed records, would establish itself as a world hub of automobile racing with the building of the Daytona International Speedway in 1959. That same year saw the inaugural running of the Daytona 500, today one of the most prestigious championships in motorsports and known as the “Great American Race.”

Built for Speed: The First Rolex Cosmographs

In 1962, Rolex seized upon the opportunity to become official timekeeper of the Daytona 500, and very shortly afterward realized that a marketing connection to the popular race could jump-start public interest in its still-struggling lineup of chronograph watches. Rolex released the model that is now regarded as the first Daytona, Ref. 6239, in 1963. The generic term “Chronograph” on the dial was replaced with the more individualistic “Cosmograph” (interestingly, a term Rolex had earlier coined for its moon-phase watches rather than its chronographs); the tachymeter scale, a useful tool for racing drivers, was notably moved to the bezel for added prominence; and the movement was upgraded to the Valjoux Caliber 722, still manually wound but with an improved regulation system. The word “Daytona” did not appear on the dial of these early references — oddly, Rolex even used the nickname “Le Mans” rather than “Daytona” in the original advertisements for them — but it was the Ref. 6239, whose black-and-white “panda” dial made it the first Rolex chronograph to use contrasting colors for the main dial and subdials, that set the template for all Daytona models that followed. Its distinctive look also caught the eye of a Hollywood icon who would play a major role in raising the watch’s profile.

Hello, Newman: The Daytona Finds Fame

Paul Newman was already an established box-office star when he attended Watkins Glen Racing School in upstate New York in the late 1960s to train for his starring role in 1969’s Winning, as a race car driver aspiring to win the Daytona 500. The movie itself was barely a footnote in Newman’s multiple award-winning career repertoire, but it did spark the actor-director’s competitive juices and moved him to begin a second career as a racing driver and later a racing team owner. (Newman’s foray into motorsports was not just a celebrity lark: he placed second in the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race  — another event for which Rolex is now the official timing partner — and he raced competitively until 2006, when he was 81.) At the start of his racing career, Newman’s wife, actress Joanne Woodward, gave him a gift that is today arguably one of the most famous watches in the world: a Rolex Daytona Ref. 6239 with a so-called “exotic” dial (example below), highlighted by some very particular details. Its main dial was an off-white cream color, punctuated by black subdials at 3, 6, and 9 o’clock with square-ended hashmarks and Art Deco-style numerals. (Another rarity: the word “Daytona,” which had begun appearing on some of the dials starting in 1965, appeared in red above the 6 o’clock subdial.) Woodward had the watch’s back engraved with the loving but cautionary message, “Drive Carefully - Me.”

Newman wore this watch, and two other similar Daytona models, also gifts from his wife, throughout his racing career. How that specific model of the Ref. 6239 first drew the attention of an admiring public to become famous as the “Paul Newman Rolex” — a nickname it didn’t acquire until the 1980s, incidentally — is something of a mystery. Supposedly Newman’s Daytona began acquiring a fan base after he wore it on the cover of an Italian magazine in the 1970s, but no such cover has ever actually been found. Both Newman’s status as a big-screen icon and auto racing’s mainstream popularity as a spectator sport reached a zenith in the 1970s, and this confluence of events surely helped elevate the profile of the Rolex Daytona, as well as, to a lesser extent, other motorsport-inspired timepieces like TAG Heuer’s Monaco, worn by Steve McQueen in the 1971 racing film, Le Mans. Whatever lit the fuse, the Rolex Daytona exploded in popularity in the ensuing decades. 

In the spirit of the automobile industry, particularly the manufacturers of competitive racing machines, Rolex has upgraded both the chassis and the engine of the Cosmograph Daytona over the years. The first Daytona in an Oyster case came in 1965; the model also added an acrylic bezel for the tachymeter scale and screw-down chrono pushers, though the pump-style pushers returned in the successor Ref. 6241. The standard size for the Daytona case was now 37.5mm, and regularly came in both steel and gold. Rolex fine-tuned the Valjoux movement that had long animated the Daytona, ramping up its frequency from 18,000 vph to 21,600 vph (thus ensuring a more accurate stopwatch function) and renaming it Caliber 727. This souped-up caliber made its debut in 1970’s Ref. 6262, produced for only one year and consequently now one of the rarest and most coveted Rolex models in the world. Rolex continued to equip the Daytona with Caliber 727 for the better part of the next two decades, including another rare and valuable model, the Ref. 6265 “Big Red” (example above, via Sotheby's), so named for the red “Daytona” text above 6 o’clock, which echoed the look of Newman’s very rare Ref. 6239, not all of which had this detail. The 6265 series, which was produced until 1987, marked the end of the so-called “first wave” of Rolex Daytonas, however, as Rolex discovered an even more powerful engine the following year. 

Automatic Upgrade: Daytona Meets El Primero

The second wave of Rolex Daytonas kicked off with Ref. 16520 (Rolex had by now initiated five-digit reference numbers) in 1988, the first Daytona outfitted with an automatic caliber instead of the manually wound calibers that had powered the series since its inception. But the Rolex Caliber 4030 wasn’t just any automatic movement: it was based on the groundbreaking Zenith El Primero, one of the first and most storied self-winding mechanical chronograph movements, which launched in 1969 alongside the also-historic Caliber 11 that debuted in the Heuer Carrera and Breitling Chrono-Matic. As I explore much further in this article, the El Primero boasted an unprecedented lineup of avant-garde chronographic innovations, including a 36,600-vph balance frequency that allowed the built-in stopwatch to measure elapsed times to 1/10 second, a column wheel with a horizontal clutch instead of a cam for a more streamlined architecture, and a “weekend-proof” 50-hour power reserve. Rolex made more than 200 of its own modifications to Zenith’s movement, like removing the date indicator and slowing down the ultra-high frequency to 28,000 vph, which increased the power reserve and, at least theoretically, decreased the intervals between servicing. In this era of larger watches, the Daytona’s case size had increased to 40mm (with material options ranging from steel to yellow and white gold to platinum), with sapphire crystals replacing the previous acrylic ones (more on that industry-wide evolution here), and the subdials now sported borders in contrasting colors.

Taking it to the House: Rolex Caliber 4130

By the end of the 20th Century, Rolex had ascended to the upper levels of vertical integration for much of its varied watchmaking disciplines, including in the production of movements, which for much of its history had been outsourced to specialists (like Valjoux and Zenith). The third generation of the Daytona landed in 2000, with Ref. 116520 — the reference numbers had now ballooned to six digits — and its fully in-house-produced movement, Caliber 4130 (above). The movement’s technical talking points included a bidirectional ball-borne rotor, a column wheel with a vertical clutch, and a hairspring made of blue Parachrom, a Rolex-patented alloy of niobium, zirconium and oxygen that offers a high level of resistance to magnetic fields, shocks, and temperature variations and a pumped-up power reserve of 72 hours. Visually, the new movement required a shifting of the subdial indicators, with elapsed minutes and hours parallel at 3 and 9 o’clock, respectively, and running seconds at 6 o’clock. 

The Daytona turned 50 years old in 2013, and Rolex celebrated with a memorable and somewhat controversial anniversary edition in a platinum case, an unusual (for Rolex) ice-blue dial, and an even more unconventional chestnut-brown bezel for the engraved tachymeter scale. What was noteworthy from a technical standpoint about the watch was the material used to forge the bezel: Cerachrom, an exclusive, patented, ceramic-based material that is virtually scratchproof and highly resistant to corrosion and UV rays. As of 2016, and the most recent revamp of the Daytona series, Cerachrom bezels are now standard. The model that debuted that year, Ref. 116500LN (below), brought the Daytona’s aesthetics back in line with its “Paul Newman” glory days, with a black bezel and a red “Daytona” over the 6 o’clock subdial. Not only the reference numbers but the lines of verbiage on the dial had increased exponentially by this point, representing the evolution of the Daytona over the decades: “Oyster Perpetual” for the waterproof case and automatic movement; “Superlative Chronometer, Officially Certified,” for the movement’s tested precision as per Rolex’s own in-house standards, which exceed those of COSC, Switzerland’s official testing agency; and the familiar “Cosmograph,” which pays tribute to the model’s roots.

Racing to the Future: Cerachrom and Beyond

Entering the third decade of the 21st Century, the popularity and pop-cultural impact of the Rolex Daytona shows no signs of abating. In 2017, a “Paul Newman” Daytona that Paul Newman actually owned — the one gifted by his wife, with the “Drive Carefully” engraving — went up for auction at Phillips and sold for $15.5 million, blowing out its $1 million estimate and becoming, as of this writing, the third-most expensive watch ever sold. On the marketing side, Rolex continues the association with motor racing that it started with the Daytona 500 way back in 1962; the brand is now also a timing partner for the FIA Formula One Championship, the Goodwood Revival, Monterey Classic Car Week, the 24 Hours of Daytona (now referred to in shorthand as the “Rolex 24”) and the legendary race that turned 100 years old in 2023, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. 

The most recent special edition of the Daytona was released in celebration of the Le Mans race’s centennial. Its 40mm case is made of 18k white gold, with a black Cerachrom bezel highlighted by a red ceramic “100” numeral on the tachymeter scale as an homage to the milestone year. Its new, exclusive movement, Caliber 4132, has also been specially modified with a chronograph hour counter that runs to a full 24 hours rather than the standard 12 hours, a nod to the length of the race. Concurrently, the Daytona itself marks its 60th birthday in 2023 with the latest generation of the model (above), defined by subtle refinements in the case for more pronounced light reflections; new dial colorways to harmoniously accentuate the contrast between dial, subdials, and subdial rings; and a new movement, Caliber 4131, an evolution of Caliber 4130 enhanced with Rolex’s energy-saving Chronergy escapement, a host of new decorative finishes, and a yellow-gold rotor. For the first time in the series, the Daytona proudly displays this high-octane horological engine behind a sapphire exhibition caseback — a rare glimpse under the hood, if you will, of the world's pre-eminent motorsport-inspired timepiece as it races full-speed into its next half-century.