Na categoria de "Independentes", René Ador, com um relógio usando um calibre Papillon, foi o vencedor.
Estação Cronográfica passa a citar a crónica de Ian Skellern, que esteve lá:On the 3rd of December 2009, the winners of the first timing competition in over 30 years were announced at the Musée d’horlogerie du Locle au Château des Monts in a very well attended ceremony.
The museum organized the timing competition to celebrate its 50th anniversary with the principle aims of highlighting, preserving and protecting the skills involved in timing regulation.
While it was billed as an international competition, 'European would have been more accurate as it was only open to competitors from Europe. That may change for the next competition scheduled for 2011.
The organizers began with 16 wristwatches and 10 finished. The fully cased watches were tested for 15 days in each of two independent testing centres, the Besançon Observatory in France and COSC in Bienne, Switzerland, as well as tests for shocks and magnetic fields.
Timing competitions in the past were mainly concentrated on pocket watches before the age of ubiquitous laptops and mobile phones. To make these new tests more relative to today's world, the watches were tested for shocks equivalent to a strong clap or moderate first pounding on a desk. A robot arm produced that type of shock 25 times in 10 different positions making 250 shocks in total.
The magnetic field the watches were exposed to was the equivalent of placing the watch near the speakers of a laptop computer.
Each watch began with 1000 points and basically; points were deducted for each second of error for each day at the two testing centres. But it was slightly more complicated than that, here is one of the formulas used for the calculations Ni = 1000 - 500 x C - 100/3 x D - 100 x Vmoy - 10 x P - 20 x Vmax - 10 x R - 12,5 x Mmoy
Watches were also test for temperature variations between 8°C, 20°C and 38°C and well as at a stable temperature of 23°C.
From the 16 watches that began the competition, 5 were eliminated at various stages due to their timing falling outside the range specified (one stopped on two occasions) and 1 was eliminated when a spring broke. As all results - except the winners- are anonymous, we do not do which watches had problems.
Two winners - one in the category 'Brands' and the other 'Independents' - were finally announced after excruciatingly overlong speeches by far too many people. And except for the winners of the two categories, all results were confidential, though the brands concerned know their own results and are free to divulge them if they wish.
Brands: The Jaeger-Lecoultre Master Tourbillon took top honours and revealed that their Reverso Gyrotourbillon came a very close second - and it was very close with second place being only one second (1 point) difference in 30 days of testing - third place was only 2 points behind that, so in reality, first place was a virtual tie.
Independents: René Addor took the honours in the independent category with his 11 day Papillon movement. This watch was only just finished in time and was his very first prototype so that will certainly be a new independent to follow.
There will be many things for the organizers to consider for the next competition and not surprisingly there are many things that could be improved- separate categories for tourbillon and perhaps even multi-axis tourbillons should be considered - but the great thing is that there is a structure in place and the timing competition have begun once again. After all, no matter how styles and complications have radically evolved over the last few years, if a watch doesn't keep good time then it's not a watch, it's a piece of jewellery.
One thing though is for sure, those that had doubts about the true benefits of tourbillon escapements in regards to accuracy will have to rethink as the results in this timing competition were unequivocal: as far as superior timing is concerned, Tourbillons Rule!
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