Many brands were thinking about going for one-tenth of second. According to Tornare, the brand was imbued with a trailblazing spirit and, buoyed up by recent successes elsewhere, decided to enter the race: “The Martel story played a big role, but there were also all the prizes we won in chronometry, and a real obsession for precision. It had produced chronographs before, working closely with Universal (later Universal Genève) and their joint supplier Martel, but they never made up a huge percentage of Zenith’s output or its marketing. It’s actually somewhat surprising that Zenith entered the race for the automatic chronograph at all. But as the movement marks its golden anniversary, Zenith is proving adept at playing the hand it has been dealt, with the most significant overhaul to the calibre in its history unveiled at Baselworld 2019. Today, the superiority of the El Primero remains both Zenith’s strength and weakness: successive CEOs have wrestled with the implications for marketing coherent collections, and the incumbent Julien Tornare is no different. Launched 50 years ago as the most ambitious of three efforts to produce an automatic chronograph, it is the only one still in production - although Zenith has had by far the most turbulent journey in the interim. For Zenith, it’s not a watch but a movement - in fact, the El Primero is so synonymous with the brand as to be all-consuming.

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