Panerai may be famous for its origins making watches for demolitions frogmen, but these days it is making waves with a team that works above the waves.
Panerai has partnered with Oracle Team USA, the yachting race group. And the watch brand is making some timepieces that are downright futuristic.
Panerai made three official watches for Oracle Team USA on the occasion of the defense of the 2017 America’s Cup. One of these was the Panerai Luminor 1950 Oracle Team USA 3 Days Chrono Flyback Automatic Ceramica 44mm. That is a pretty high-tech piece of work. Panerai may be very attached to their brand history, but they are also constantly looking for ways to forge ahead and break new ground. In this instance, they are also paying tribute to the Oracle Team USA, a group of professionals who have dedicated themselves to shaping the face of modern sailing. And they’re using a material that I practically space-age.
“…a rolling world of water where you can never take your eye off the prize”
Things aren’t what they used to be, the saying goes. Well, that’s particularly true in the world of competitive yachting. True some things never change: the sea, the wind, the water. But the way that men race across those waves has changed a lot in modern times, and the rate of change has only accelerated.
Yachting for pleasure may be seen as a leisurely, somewhat sedentary art. You point the boat and raise the sail and nature does the rest, right, so how hard can it be? But the world of 21st Century race yachting means sailing a finely tuned instrument that is always just about to go off-pitch, a craft that needs constant attention, a rolling world of water where you can never take your eye off the prize, because winning is about gaining the most possible speed with the least possible weight, and wringing every tiniest bit of push you can out of a wind that is in no way under your control. And for those brave souls of Oracle Team USA, Panerai has made the limited edition Luminor 1950 Oracle Team USA 3 Days Chrono Flyback Automatic Ceramica 44mm.
“… the past hand-in-hand with the future.”
The Panerai Laboratory of Ideas is an innovative bunch, and they are specifically dedicated to finding new and creative ways to deal with upcoming (and sometimes unexpected) situations. One choice that was made was the decision to render the case of the Oracle Team watch in ceramic, zirconium oxide ceramic, matte black in appearance. This includes the well-known Luminor bridge lever device that locks down the crown and protects it from accidental impact. That crown protector also exerts a light pressure on the crown, which actually helps with maintaining the water resistance. The Oracle Team USA watch is water resistant to 10 bar, or about a hundred meters.
The watch’s P.9100 Manufacture caliber gives the watch a flyback chronograph function that lets you zero out and restart the moving chronograph hands with a single push of the button. The hands use the colors of the America’s Cup: the chronograph seconds hand is blue, and the chronograph minutes hand is red.
Note also the red tachymeter scale on the flange. It measures in knots, which allows you to compute the speed of a craft over a given distance. The screwed-down case back is made of titanium treated black, and it has the Oracle Team USA logo on it. There’s even a silhouette image of the team’s trimaran craft. All in all, it’s just the thing when time is of the essence, and the wind must make you fly.
