The Strangely Seductive Tudor Black Bay P01: Notes On An Interesting Watch

The Tudor Black Bay P01 came out in 2019 and a lot of people had a lot to say about it – you expect to hear lots of opinions expressed whenever Tudor releases a new watch but this one was a doozy. There were of course other things going on  – Tudor launched a Black Bay Bronze and a couple of two tone models, including a Black Bay chronograph, at the same time – but there was something about the P01 that really seemed to get tongues wagging.

Nobody can deny that the most common first reaction to the P01 was to find it odd. The watch was, according to Tudor, based on a prototype which had never made it into production (some of the naysayers thought things should have stayed that way) called the “Commando” which was made as a proposal to the US Navy, some time in the 1960s. As Cole Pennington pointed out at the time, this was an age when there was a lot of experimenting going on in extreme engineering, and a lot of experimenting going on in design in general and the watch world was no different – after the augustan restraint of the 1950s, cases were getting bigger and chunkier and dials were starting to experiment, sometimes vividly, with color.

The P01 and the prototype on which it was based, were however not exercises in style. The Commando was designed to fulfill a particular purpose, and was an attempt to provide additional security for the position of the timing bezel. The watch followed many of the basic requirements for a dive watch – water resistant, with a highly legible white-on-black luminous dial and hands, a timing bezel, and a rather broad-shouldered case that reflects the expectation that the prototype would be in for some hard knocks if used operationally. The P01 is not an exact copy paste of the Commando – I think we can safely assume the presence of modern case gaskets and seals, modern lubricants, and of course, a modern movement, Tudor caliber MT5612.

The movement is a COSC-certified chronometer, with balance bridge, silicon balance spring, freesprung balance, and a 70 hour power reserve. I don’t know what movement Tudor put inside the original Commando prototype but given the fact that the Commando was made sometime during the 1960s, it seems likely if not probably that the movement would have been the automatic caliber 390, as seen in the ref. 7928 Tudor Submariner, produced from 1959 to about 1968. I’m as big a retro-nostalgist as ever but I don’t think anyone could deny that the MT5612 is an improvement.

The new P01 is slightly different in other respects (Cole’s article has a good side-by-side comparison with the Commando prototype) – it looks a bit thinner, with a less prominently domed crystal, and a wider, flatter bezel; the new version also does away with the superfluous black triangle on the locking mechanism, and it uses snowflake hands, rather than the Mercedes hands on the prototype. The bezel on both the Commando and the P01 is not a standard unidirectional dive watch bezel marked for timing intervals of up to sixty minutes, with one minute hash marks for the critical first fifteen minutes. Instead, both watches have a 12 hour count-up bezel – I suppose for practical mission purposes this would make the watches more useful as mission timers.

The locking mechanism is of course the unique selling proposition of the P01 – there’s no specific information on how or if the mechanism was updated mechanically from the original but as with the entire transition from the Commando to the P01, I’m sure the implementation has been updated and improved (it would have had to be if for no other reason than changes in bezel diamenter, although the knurling looks more or less identical). The bezel lock is straightforward to use, and it does its job – once dropped into the locked position, it holds the bezel quite firmly in place (it looks like there is a a small projection on the underside of the lock that drops into one of the indentations on the upper surface of the bezel).

The P01 also comes on a leather strap, which seems an unusual choice for a dive watch, although the sides and back of the strap are sheathed in rubber, which will add to strap longevity. The case feels very much a product of a design program directed at producing a candidate for use in the field – surfaces are brushed to reduce reflections, and in general, decorative beveling is absent, contributing to the P01’s no-nonsense personality.

The lume is of course, modern as well. The industry by the late 1960s had transitioned from hazardous radium and strontium based pigments, to tritium, and here Tudor has used a slightly ecru-tinted lume, but it’s not heavy handed at all – it reads more as a design decision rather than an overt attempt to give the watch a vintage look and feel (which it needs little help doing in any case). A nice touch is that the date disk is tinted to match the hands and lume plots on the dial.

Despite the size of the watch, it’s wearable on smaller wrists than you might think. This is thanks to the mobile end links for the strap, which give the watch a secure fit on smaller wrists – in his review video, Tim Mosso says that if your wrist is 15cm or larger, you should be able to get away with it, although this is an unapologetically physically assertive timepiece.

I lead with that hifalutin’ Emerson quote because I think it’s apropos. Is the P01 ugly? If by “ugly” you mean that it fails to conform to a certain ideal standard of beauty, then I suppose depending on the standard you apply, it might be a reasonable charge to levy against the P01. However, dive watches in general are not supposed to be exercises in aesthetics, except insofar as making a mechanical object to a real standard of utility, can transcend utility and produce an aesthetic all its own; you can ornament a dive watch, or make it out of precious metals, or both, but that’s always going to feel – no matter how well it does or doesn’t work – a little redundant to the actual purpose of the watch.

For the record, I’m with Emerson on this, at least as I understand the quote – the only thing really ugly is being boring, albeit there are lots of ways to be boring (predictable, rote, thoughtless, overdone ornamentation and detail can be just as boring as being unimaginatively simplistic). When the watch launched in 2019, I really thought it would be around for maybe a year, but much to my (pleasant) surprise, it is still very much in the catalog, and the intervening five years have seen me go from perplexity to fascination.The P01 is very much not business as usual, but in the me-too world of dive watches, the fact that it has so much of its own identity, is if you ask me, a feature, not a bug. I’ve heard a lot of things said about the P01, but one word I’ve never heard used, and I suspect never will, is “boring.”

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