The Origins Of The New Chronomaster Sport
For the Chronomaster Sport, Zenith recalls the ‘80s and ‘90s, drawing inspiration from a model renamed the 'Chronomaster De Luca'.
We asked Claudio Leonardi - who at the time was commercial director of Guido Descombes, the well-known Zenith importer in Italy - about the origins of this particular model.
“It was the end of the 1980s,” Leonardi remnisces, "when in Italy there was a growing demand for sports chronographs, such as the Rolex Daytona, as well as others. At the time, the president of Zenith was François Manfredini. In one of our usual conversations, I asked him to make a sports watch, the kind of which there was great demand in Italy, with the El Primero movement .”
Of course, a certain degree of inspiration was required. It was destiny that this would be found ‘at home’, thanks to another Italian: Sergio De Luca.
“De Luca was the sales manager of the southern area. He was deeply passionate about watchmaking and had a decent collection of his own. Among his pieces was a Zenith model from the 1970s (factory reference A277), a manual winding chronograph with a rotating bezel.”
Everything stemmed from this original 'De Luca'. “I told him: bring it to the factory, and we will have a model made with the El Primero movement”. And so it came to pass.
“Since it was Sergio De Luca who brought it to Zenith, the code name of the watch, while it was being manufactured and in conversations between us, was ‘De Luca’,” concludes Leonardi.
Julien Tornare, CEO of Zenith says, “The A277 was a chronograph prior to El Primero, manually wound, which had a Martel movement. After it, came the De Luca and the Rainbow. When we started working on the design of the Chronomaster two and a half years ago, we put these two watches on the table and stylistically derived the Chronomaster Sport from them.”
The caliber, the new El Primero 3600, takes up the functionality introduced in 2011 in the El Primero Striking 10th, with the central hand of a tenth of a second (which completes the turn of the dial in 10 seconds), now more readable thanks to the scale indexes on the ceramic bezel.
Another important innovation is the power reserve which goes from 50 to 60 hours, allowing you to take the watch off your wrist during the weekend and find it still running on Monday morning.
by Dody Giussani