Very few people had the access, the scratch, and the societal import necessary to secure an allocation of the now-legendary Cosmograph Daytona 126529LN—aka the “Le Mans” Daytona. We now know that, like many great watches, one went to Michael Jordan.
This particular take on the Crown’s famed racing chronograph dropped partway through 2023 in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the famed endurance race first held in France in 1923. While Rolex is well known for its iterative, slow-and-steady improvement process, it does relatively little in the way of vintage-inspired hat-tips, but that changed on the “Le Mans.” The ref. 126529LN was special because it was full of little Easter eggs: a “panda” configuration with a black dial and silvered chronograph totalizers; “exotic-dial” (aka “Paul Newman” Daytona) typography in the subdials; and red “Daytona” text like on vintage models. Meanwhile, red “100” text on the bezel calls out the 100th anniversary of Le Mans, while a 24-hour totalizer in place of the usual 12-hour counter references the race’s run time.
In addition to all the nostalgic nods, Rolex guaranteed this watch would be a classic when the brand took it out of production in April of this year. That means the 126529LN was made for less than a year after debuting in June of 2023.
The “Le Mans” Daytona was all the more notable because its debut occurred after several other Daytona models in Geneva that year, coinciding with the model’s 60th birthday. Rolex updated the watch’s movement; made the sundial rings thinner; used smaller hour indices; and added a ring around the ceramic bezel to match the watch’s case metal. Again: iterative, slow-and-steady improvement wins the race. The Le Mans Daytona, however, was tailor-made for collections like Jordan’s.
His Airness is well known for his eye-wateringly rare and expensive watches. Though many of them are from high-end independent brands, some of them are more common—though no less compelling—references from Rolex such as his white gold Sky-Dweller and pink gold Daytona. As cool as those pieces are, they don’t hold a candle to the white-gold Le Mans, which has rocketed to a roughly quarter-million-dollar valuation on the secondary market. Production numbers for this piece are, of course, anybody’s guess, but given the quick, in-and-out journey the ref. 126529LN has taken through the Rolex catalog, we can be sure there are relatively few floating around.
Indeed, this white-gold wonder sped off the track before we humble watch journalists scarcely had time to write about it. After leaving the catalog in April, it was quietly replaced with a yellow-gold version that received no official announcement from Rolex at this year’s Watches & Wonders trade show. The first we saw of it was on Roger Federer’s wrist roughly a month back. Only God and Rolex CEO Jean-Frederic Dufour know how long we can expect this new yellow-gold version to stick around in the Crown’s catalog However, given the extremely limited production of the white-dial model and the near-complete lack of communication about it, we can safely assume that before next year’s Genevan extravaganza, it’ll have sped off into the sunset. But probably not before Jordan can get his hands on one of those, too.
