Tudor signed with the Visa Cash App Racing Bulls Formula 1 team in 2024, and the partnership has since produced a watch a year. First came the Black Bay Ceramic Blue, the watch the team's drivers actually wore. Then the Black Bay Chrono Carbon 25 in 2025, which moved the chronograph into a carbon-fibre case and took its colour from the VCARB 02 race car. The 2026 watch, shown on June 12, follows the same logic. It is the Black Bay Chrono Carbon 26, and it borrows the yellow of this season's VCARB 03.
What carries over
Almost the entire watch. The case is 42mm across and 14.3mm thick, built from carbon fibre down to the end-links that join the strap, with a fixed carbon-fibre bezel carrying a tachymeter scale in a single-piece construction. The crown, pushers and caseback are titanium under a black PVD coat. A domed sapphire crystal sits over the dial, water resistance is 200 metres, and the chronograph pushers stay at two and four o'clock with the Snowflake hands and bicompax layout the Black Bay Chrono has always used. None of that is new this year, and Tudor has not pretended otherwise.
What changed
The dial. Tudor keeps the racing-white base and the black carbon-fibre sub-counters, but the accents that were blue on the Carbon 25 are now yellow, matching the VCARB 03 livery. The yellow runs around the minute track, picks out the two sub-dials and colours the date disc behind the window at six, which itself sits in a carbon-fibre frame. The dial is layered from brass discs and carbon-fibre sheets, which gives it some depth, and the hands and applied markers are outlined in black to hold legibility against the white. The display is unchanged: central hours, minutes and chronograph seconds, a 45-minute counter at three, and a small-seconds register at nine.
The movement, the run and the price
Inside is the Manufacture Calibre MT5813, the automatic chronograph Tudor builds on the architecture of the Breitling B01. It is COSC-certified, uses a column wheel and a variable-inertia balance with a non-magnetic silicon hairspring, beats at 28,800 vibrations per hour, and holds around 70 hours of reserve. Tudor regulates the finished watch to minus two and plus four seconds a day, tighter than COSC requires. The watch comes on a hybrid leather-rubber strap with a tyre tread and a blackened pin buckle.
The Black Bay Chrono Carbon 26 is a limited edition of 2,026 pieces, each caseback individually numbered. It is priced at EUR 7,980, or CHF 7,050, a premium over a standard steel Black Bay Chrono and the same money the Carbon 25 asked. Whether 2,026 pieces is scarce enough to hold that premium is the open question. One commenter under Monochrome's first look noted the watch was already trading below retail on the secondary market the day it launched. A yearly limited edition tends to do that.
