Hands-On A Sweet New Cycling Watch Collaboration Between Bremont and Rapha

These days there's a new crop of rider ambassadors wearing the Breitling Endurance Professional and Richard Mille watches while racing – we've got three-time Grand tour winner and Breitling ambassador Vincenzo Nibali, former World Champion Julian Alaphilippe (RM 67-02), sprinter legend Mark Cavendish (RM-011), and two-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar (another RM 67-02).

And just a few weeks ago, Tudor announced its support of a European professional continental team.

Just as we see in motorsport, throughout the ranks of both professionals and amateurs, there's a clear intersection in cycling between engineering and performance – and a distinct need for accurate timekeeping. So this very cool Bremont MBIII GMT Special Edition collaboration with luxury cycling-apparel maker Rapha doesn't just feel like a natural pairing. It's actually a long overdue one that I hope helps push this trend forward.

What's the best watch for cyclists anyway? As a matter of fact, we posed this exact question to Rapha's London office a little over a year ago to see what kinds of watches its team members were wearing at work and on the bike, and the responses were about as varied as one could expect.

For me personally, the lazy answer is "the one on your wrist." But after having logged thousands of hours in the saddle with a watch on the wrist, I can confidently say that while specific models may vary, there's at least a definitive best "type" of watch.

I tend to look for three criteria: Lightness, legibility, and water resistance. Any function beyond these three things (a 60-minute bezel, a lap timer, power, heart rate, etc.) is a "nice-to-have," but should be relegated to your head unit – be it a Wahoo or a Garmin – which is ultimately going to be easier to see at a glance anyway.

The watch should be light enough so that it doesn't bounce around on the wrist (titanium or some form of composite are perfect) or leave cuts or scars in your skin from the crown. It should be analog and instantly legible (because at 25 or 30 miles per hour, a glance is all you get), and it should be confidently water resistant, because for a lot of us, cycling tends to be an all-weather affair.

And yes, I know my Wahoo can display the time, but I already have my screens customized to show only the data fields I want, and if I want to know the time, which is important but arguably less important than some ride metrics like overall ride time and elevation gained, I'll just glance at my wrist.

All things considered, the Bremont MB or "Martin Baker" series of watches is the British maker's best and most logical blueprint for a cycling-adjacent collaboration. After all, its multi-piece 43mm Trip Tick case and patented movement holder were designed specifically to resist all the violent shock from being ejected from a stricken fighter jet (an event that subjects its pilot to over 25 Gs of force), so riding a little Midwest chipseal or a heavily washboarded gravel road would be no problem with this on the wrist.

I also particularly like that Rapha chose lightweight Grade 5 titanium as the case material, and the MBIII for its collab edition, as this highly legible and super-wearable reference adds in the GMT complication – particularly handy if you're headed to Girona for an InGamba retreat, or if you're a global citizen like Rapha CEO Simon Mottram, who conducts a fair amount of communication between the brand's flagship store and office in London and its many other "Clubhouses" scattered around the world in cycling hotspots like San Francisco, Boulder, New York, Mallorca, Berlin, Seoul, Tokyo, and Melbourne. Just bear in mind that the Bremont BE-93-2AV (an ETA 2893 base) caliber powering this watch is a "caller" GMT, meaning the 24-hour hand and the date are what's quickset via the crown, rather than the local hour hand of a "true" GMT.

The rest of the MB series' key details persist here – there's the striped "ejection seat" loop used in the seconds hand (which is now rendered in "Rapha Pink" instead of the traditional yellow), the Roto Click bezel operated via the second crown at 2:00, and the heavily knurled case barrel – which was mysteriously rendered in black, rather than anodized pink or grey to match the rest of the details in the collab. Probably an intentional omission, but giving buyers the choice to have a little more color pop might have been nice here, as the watch's DLC-coated exterior doesn't yield much in the way of contrast, particularly when tucked into an arm warmer.

Does it make sense to ride with a luxury watch? Let's be honest, crashes happen. Hitting the deck isn't just a rite of passage in the cycling world, it's more or less an expectation for all of us at some point (some of us more often than others). And though I don't entirely disagree with the logic of damage avoidance, at the same time, the concern rings hollow to me when it comes from someone already riding a $5,000 S-Works equipped with $3,000 wheels and a $2,500 electronic shifting groupset. Cycling is expensive, and most bikes and peripherals, by extension, are luxury objects just like many analog watches. So while I understand the desire to avoid unnecessary damage of an expensive object while out on the bike, the same could be said for the bike itself, where the only solution to keep something safe would be to not wear it, not ride it, or not drive it. Besides, as most bikes and team kits regularly come and go, a good watch can be a neat singular personal totem that ties together an entire cycling career.

While I'd personally have no qualms about riding with such a shock-resistant watch as the MBIII, its all-black-everything aesthetic and broad, twin-crown design might give me pause about choosing this as my dedicated training partner. But it's quite a cool acknowledgement of the well-heeled enthusiast riding space which is filled with folks who, at the end of the day, agree that riding with a watch remains in and of itself a similar form of rebellion not unlike diving with a watch or driving with a watch.

Sure, there will always be more feature-rich digital alternatives to an analog instrument, but the fact remains that even in the chill of a morning ride or the misery of an unending climb, there still remains no greater simple joy than a quick glance at the wrist.

The Bremont MBIII Rapha Special Edition is being offered exclusively to Rapha Cycling Club (RCC) members, and it has a price of $5,595.

Photos by Zachary Piña

Zachary Piña is a proud midwest expat and freelance creator now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he fills his days running a small, independent media house while cycling, birding, and exploring as much of California's coastline as possible.