Paul Newman's Rolex Daytona

A watch for racing drivers

Rolex introduced the Cosmograph Daytona in 1963, naming it after the Daytona International Speedway in Florida. It is a chronograph, a watch with a stopwatch built in, and its bezel carries a tachymeter scale so a driver can work out average speed over a measured distance.

Early Daytonas were wound by hand and made in small numbers. Some were fitted with what Rolex called exotic dials, with a distinctive typeface, square markers on the small sub-dials and a contrasting outer track. At first these were not especially popular.

The Paul Newman dial

The actor Paul Newman took up motor racing in the early 1970s, and his wife Joanne Woodward gave him a Daytona with an exotic dial, engraved on the back with the words Drive Carefully Me. He wore it for years, and photographs of him with it made the dial famous. Collectors began calling every exotic dial a Paul Newman dial.

Experts now use that name only for original dials fitted by Rolex to the early hand-wound Daytonas with four-digit reference numbers, such as the 6239. Because exotic dials were produced in smaller numbers, these watches became some of the most sought-after vintage Rolex pieces.

A watch that went missing

In 1984 Newman gave the watch to James Cox, then the boyfriend of his daughter Nell. For decades collectors wondered where it was. It resurfaced in 2017, when Cox decided to sell it and said he would give a large part of the proceeds to the Nell Newman Foundation.

The watch was sold on 26 October 2017 at Phillips in New York, in a sale called Winning Icons. The final price was 17,752,500 US dollars, a record for a wristwatch at the time.

Where it stands today

The Paul Newman Daytona has since been overtaken by the Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime, sold in 2019, but it remains the most famous Rolex ever auctioned. Its story shows how much a known owner and a well-documented history can matter to collectors.

The watches pictured here are other vintage Daytonas, including a reference 6263 from the early 1970s. Newman himself later wore a 6263 with a conventional dial, also a gift from his wife.

Rolex still makes the Daytona today. It moved to self-winding movements in 1988 and to an in-house chronograph movement in 2000, and the current generation arrived in 2023. Modern versions keep the three sub-dial layout and tachymeter bezel that defined the early racing watch.

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