Seiko Adds Field Colors To 5 Sports GMT; A Captain Cook With A Sparkling Golden Dial; Maurice de Mauriac Marks Swiss Tennis' 130th; Sartory-Billard Uses Old Skateboards; A Smaller Petermann Bédat

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Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Skateboarding and tennis in the same issue? Looking at me you couldn’t tell, but I did both of those.

In this issue

• Seiko Adds Two Very Nice Field Colors To Its Affordable 5 Sports GMT

• Rado Gives Their Classy Captain Cook A Sparkling Golden Dial

• Maurice de Mauriac Marks Swiss Tennis' 130th Anniversary With A Fantastic Rallymaster

• Sartory-Billard Marks Its Tenth Anniversary With A Jumping Hour Built From Old Skateboards

• Petermann Bédat Shrinks The Reference 1825 To 36.3mm For A The Hour Glass Japan Exclusive

👂What’s new

1/

Seiko Adds Two Very Nice Field Colors To Its Affordable 5 Sports GMT

Seiko's 5 Sports Field GMT is becoming one of the better ways to get a mechanical GMT for under €500, and now there are two more dial colors to choose from. The HDB001 Khaki Drill and HDB002 Desert Sand join the black version from 2024 and this year's white grainy edition, both leaning harder into the military field-watch look than those that came before.

The case is 39.40mm wide and 13.60mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47.90mm. It's made out of stainless steel with brushed surfaces and a fluted crown at 3 o'clock, rated to 100 meters of water resistance. The crystal is Seiko's curved Hardlex, the hardened mineral glass the brand uses across its more affordable lines. It resists impacts better than standard mineral but it isn't sapphire.

Khaki Drill is a military green pulled from field uniforms, while Desert Sand a warm beige meant to read like dry ground. Both use white numerals and hands, and the red GMT hand pops against either background. The layout is straightforward field-watch: large luminous Arabic numerals for the 12-hour scale, a smaller inner 24-hour track, and a fixed 24-hour bezel to work the second time zone.

Inside is Seiko's calibre 4R34, an automatic with 24 jewels, hacking seconds, hand-winding, and a 41-hour power reserve, beating at 21,600 vph and visible through the exhibition caseback. It's not fancy, but it's the workhorse that has kept the 5 Sports line running for years, and it's cheap to service. This is the caller style GMT, where the 24-hour hand is the one you set, so it's built for tracking a second zone at home rather than jumping time zones on a plane. Both watches come on a five-link steel bracelet with a folding clasp, but I assume they will look amazing on a NATO strap.

The Seiko 5 Sports Field GMT HDB001 Khaki Drill and HDB002 Desert Sand go on sale in August 2026, priced at €490. See the Khaki Drill here and the Desert Sand here.

2/

Rado Gives Their Classy Captain Cook A Sparkling Golden Dial

The Captain Cook has been Rado's consistent triumph since its 2017 revival, spawning ceramic divers, skeletons, chronographs, and last year's gradient dials. The newest iteration keeps the familiar 39mm layout and gives it a new dial. It's golden, it sparkles, and it's the most extroverted this collection has looked in a while.

The steel case measures 39mm wide, the middle option between the 37mm and 43mm versions, with a lug-to-lug of 45.5mm and a thickness of 12mm thick. Those are friendly proportions, especially that lug-to-lug, and none of the diving credibility gets sacrificed for them. Water resistance remains 300 meters, thanks to a screw-down crown and caseback. The rotating bezel is steel with a yellow gold-coloured PVD coating, topped by a polished black ceramic insert with white Super-LumiNova numerals. The box sapphire crystal is coated front and back with anti-reflecting treatments, and gives you that curved edge distortion the Captain Cook is loved for.

Rado built the dial up through a multi-stage gold finish that has an appearance of diamond powder, a rough and shimmering surface. It's bold and a little extravagant, and it works. The applied indices get yellow gold-coloured PVD and white Super-LumiNova, the hands are broad and legible, and the moving anchor still spins under 12 o'clock with the date at 3.

Inside is the automatic calibre R763, Rado's branded version of the ETA C07.611 Powermatic 80. It runs at 21,600 vibrations/hour, carries an 80-hour power reserve, and uses a Nivachron balance spring for better magnetic resistance. The watch ships on both a steel bracelet with brushed outer links and polished rice-grain centres, and a black textured rubber strap.

The new Rado Captain Cook ref. R32223258 is available now, priced at CHF 2,450. See more on the Rado website.

3/

Maurice de Mauriac Marks Swiss Tennis' 130th Anniversary With A Fantastic Rallymaster

More and more watch brands are tying themselves to ever increasing sports. Cycling, freediving, and gold are all getting their own dedicated watches. But it seems to me that it’s tennis that has the most watches, and among the brands that are doing tennis-themed watches, I kind of like those made by Maurice de Mauriac the most. This Zurich-based, family-owned, brand is best known for their quirky approach to design, but also their tennis tie-ins made over the past few years, from timekeeping the Swiss Open in Gstaad to a signature watch with Stan Smith. Becoming the official timekeeper of Swiss Tennis was always going to end in a dedicated watch. This is it. The Rallymaster line, designed by New York-based designer Carlton DeWoody, started as a set of limited editions built around the four Majors, and it has become one of the better tennis-themed watches around. The Swiss Tennis edition takes the same platform and dedicates it to the federation's 130th birthday.

The case is brushed stainless steel, 39mm wide and 12mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47mm that keeps it comfortably in the middle for most wrists. A screw-in crown has an embossed Swiss Tennis logo, the sapphire crystal is anti-reflective with a date magnifier, and the exhibition caseback is printed with the federation's logo. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is opaline silver with applied indices and a rally réhaut, and it reinterprets the Swiss color scheme: the pale silver stands in for snow, the red shows up in three gradient shades across the small-seconds subdial and date disc. Applied tennis-ball indexes glow through custom Super-LumiNova, there's a luminescent tennis-net decoration running across the dial, and the small-seconds subdial at 9 o'clock is divided into three 20-second increments, a nod to the old serve clock before the rule changed to 25. The yellow lollipop seconds hand is a nice touch. It's a busy dial that stays legible, which is always appreciated.

Inside is the Landeron 24 automatic, a Swiss movement running at 28,800vph with 40 hours of power reserve. The watch ships with two straps on a quick-release system: a vintage-style Milanese mesh, and a two-piece stretch-fabric bracelet in red.

The Rallymaster Swiss Tennis is a limited edition of 130, priced at CHF 2,500. See more on the Maurice de Mauriac website.

4/

Sartory-Billard Marks Its Tenth Anniversary With A Jumping Hour Built From Old Skateboards

If you skated as a kid (or still do), you know exactly what a beat-up deck looks like in cross-section: the plywood layers, the worn grip tape, the chips. Sartory-Billard, know for their inventive looks, has turned that into the face of a watch. The SB10 50-50 Grind, a 50-piece tenth-anniversary edition, replaces their colorful dials entirely with a cabochon cut from real skateboard decks and grip, developed with the Skateboard Museum of Geneva.

The case is 39.5mm wide and a genuinely wearable 11.5mm thick, stainless steel with alternating polished and satin finishing and a lug-to-lug of 44mm. Water resistance is 80 meters. The cabochon is fixed and it is meant to be touched as much as looked at, with the German luthier Martin Krause handling the delicate wood cuts and Billard assembling each one themselves. Because every deck section is different, no two watches are the same way.

There is no dial and there are no hands. The hour appears at six through a deliberately oversized aperture on a 0.2mm sapphire disc that jumps 30 degrees on the hour, and Mr. Billard makes no secret of why it's so big: at 50, he wants to actually see the time. The numerals were drawn for the brand by typographer Simon Schmidt. Minutes are indicated by a second sapphire disc rotating continuously around the cabochon, tracked by a red marker against a peripheral ring of Super-LumiNova BGW9.

Inside is the automatic La Joux-Perret G100, a reliable third-party base with a 55-hour power reserve, fitted with Sartory-Billard's patented jumping hour module to give the disc its sharp instantaneous snap. The watch comes on a Sartory-Billard rubber strap, offered in white, grey, black, blue, red, brown, and green.

The SB10 50-50 Grind is limited to 50 pieces, priced at CHF 3,700 excluding taxes. See more on the Sartory-Billard website.

5/

Petermann Bédat Shrinks The Reference 1825 To 36.3mm For A The Hour Glass Japan Exclusive

This is one of those releases that I kind of missed when it came out about a month ago. And usually, I would let it go after so much time has passed, especially since only five of each color were made, but I like Petermann Bédat so much I have to mention them. Also, this is such a niche release, there’s a small chance you could get one still. Gaël Petermann and Florian Bédat spent years restoring watches from the 1930s through the 1970s before they built anything of their own, and that education shows up here. The reference 1826 takes their 1825 three-hander, introduced last October, and shrinks it down to a size that would have been unremarkable in 1955. The reference 1826 is a limited duo for The Hour Glass in Japan, their new retailer in the country

The case measures 36.3mm wide and 10.15mm thick, in either rose gold or white gold. A box sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating sits over the dial. The pair have wanted a more compact case since they started, and at this diameter the watch has the understated wrist presence that the vintage pieces they trained on had by default. Hopefully, we’ll get many more watches in this size, whatever many might mean from Petermann Bédat.

The dial is grand feu enamel from Olivier Vaucher, built on a gold plate, black on the white gold version and white ivory on the rose gold. The PB logo and the minute and second tracks are printed. Hands are rose gold or hand-finished steel depending on the case, with hours, minutes, and small seconds.

Inside is the in-house calibre 233, hand-wound, running at 18,000 vibrations per hour with a 56-hour power reserve and 21 jewels. The main plate and bridges are German silver, with solid gold wheels, steel parts, and a Breguet overcoil balance spring. Finishing is impeccable: Côtes de Genève with hand-polished chamfers, sun graining and perlage on the main plate, black-polished steel, circular graining across the wheels and balance, snail graining on the barrel and ratchet. It comes on a brown or black alligator strap with a matching gold pin buckle.

The new Petermann Bédat reference 1826 is limited to five pieces in each metal, priced at CHF 96,000 without taxes and sold exclusively through The Hour Glass Japan.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Willian Finnegan folds the story of a fatal mountaineering expedition into a courtroom drama, with each narrative track just as tense as the other. Last year, Kerstin Gurtner froze to death on Grossglockner, an Austrian mountain whose peak extends more than 12,000 feet above the Adriatic Sea. Her boyfriend and climbing partner, Thomas Plamberger, was charged with grossly negligent homicide. Finnegan, no stranger to climbing himself, is an attentive, critical presence in the courtroom, questioning the role of “mountain-man obtuseness” in a lethal misadventure. The question that ghosts this story: When does self-reliance begin to interfere with our obligations to others?

• Lavender Au’s Dial essay dives into China’s short-drama boom: bite-sized episodes with addictive plotlines that some 215 million people watch daily on apps like Hongguo. Reporting from Beijing, Au explains how these dramas condense soapy, high-stakes narratives into one or two minutes, perfect for “fragmented and exhausting work schedules.” Beneath the surface, though, is real subversion—a strong heroine who defies conventional beauty standards and holds her own against an emperor—and an emotional payoff the Chinese call shuang 爽.

• In John Hughes’s beloved 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, there’s a pivotal scene that depends on three things: Cameron Frye, Ferris’s anxious best friend; Cameron’s father’s Ferrari; and the cantilevered glass pavilion of a spectacular modernist Highland Park home, where the car meets its fate. In an excerpt from his new book Ferris Bueller . . . You’re My Hero, Jason Klamm reconstructs how the scene came together, from the location scouting to the moment the car flies through the glass into a ravine below.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Despite the World Cup being a complete farse, there’s one person that is living a second resurgance, especially among the new U.S. fans — Zlatan Ibrahimovic. How can you not love this guy.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk