We’ve tried our hardest over the last couple of years to predict what Tudor would roll out to no prevail. Our failure at doing so has actually become a running gag on the podcast. Well, they finally made exactly what we wanted with the Tudor Black Bay Pro, maybe even predicted, and to quote Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka “you do know what happened to the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted, don’t you?.. He lived happily ever after.”
The Tudor Black Bay Pro is the watch many of us have fantasized about since the dual introduction of the Black Bay GMT and the Black Bay 58 back in 2018. A watch that mixes the in-house “true” GMT complication of the former, with the scale of the latter. But, in a very pleasant surprise (Tudor is good at surprises) the execution has more to it than simply being a scaled-down version of the original Pepsi-bezel GMT.
At a glance, the Black Bay Pro is a fixed bezel 39mm GMT with a matte black dial and a burnt yellow GMT hand, which is excellent to begin with, but the details are what make it really stand out. The bezel is brushed steel with the same typeface as the larger GMT in black fill, which takes on a distinctly Explorer 2 ref. 1655 character in this setting. The brushing radiates out from the dial with an appealing grain, terminating at a polished chamfer.
The dial has a subtle grain to it as well, and all of the markers and indexes, save the depth rating, are off-white. Neither a “fauxtina” tone nor a stark white, it’s nicely balanced to have a softness we perhaps associate with age, but also a warm and earthy quality. A keen eye might have already noticed something that is actually lacking from the dial as well – marker surrounds. Gone are the typical little polished containers, rather Tudor has utilized, for the first time, a lume/ceramic composite.