Shopping Time: The 5 Best Rolex Daytona ‘Paul Newmans’ on the Market Right Now

We are always scouring the web for the most amazing watches currently available, and each Friday Shopping Time shares five standout timepieces with you.

Prices on most Rolex sport models keep falling, but not for the suddenly popular Day-Date 36 and certainly not for the impossible-to-get Daytona. Here at Shopping Time, we’ve recently brought you tasty examples of the Rolex GMT Master, the Submariner, a bevy of good deals on current Rolex references, and, yes, six lovely, modern Daytonas. But what we haven’t done, until today, is head straight to the most valuable Daytona: the Paul Newman. We didn’t even know if we’d find five of them worth writing home about, but indeed we did. They’re all killer examples that you can buy right now.

The legend of the Paul Newman Daytona was set in stone in 2017 when the man’s own exotic-dial reference 6239 sold at auction for an astonishing $17,752,500. But the lore goes much, much deeper. This specific configuration of the Daytona is inextricably linked to actor, race car driver, philanthropist, and all around cool guy, Paul Newman for his use of it throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. The story of the watch and its use is a poignant reminder of why many of us are drawn to watches, specifically tool watches and sports watches, to begin with. In fact, Newman is arguably the foundation of the watch’s reputation, and why it’s one of the most sought after vintage Rolex watches in the world.

In the late ‘60s, after filming James Goldstone’s movie Winning, Newman’s wife, co-star Joanne Woodward, would purchase the famed Daytona in New York as a gift for Paul, who was beginning to seriously get into racing cars at the time. She had the caseback engraved with the message “Drive Carefully, Me” lending some personal weight to the gift. At the time, this particular configuration of the Daytona, fitted with the so-called exotic dial, was not a popular model with customers. They often sat on shelves or were sold at discounts, and as a result, Rolex didn’t produce many. The resulting rarity adds to the value and the lore of the Newman Daytona.

It would be about a decade after receiving the 6239 Daytona from Woodward before anyone would really pick up on the unique dial configuration in a meaningful way. In the late ‘70s, Rolex sponsored the publication of a book about Paul Newman’s career, Les images d’une vie (Picture of a Life), which would place an image of Newman on the cover with the watch clearly visible on his wrist. It was this image that sparked the acknowledgement and eventual popularity of the exotic dial Daytona reference. Today, there are plenty of photographs documenting his use of the watch both on and off the track, and while he owned and wore a variety of Daytona references, this 6239 was the only to feature an exotic dial.

It is said among some high-end collectors that Newman appeared on the cover of a magazine in Italy wearing the watch in the 1980s, and that this image alone spurred horological hysteria among collectors in Milan and Florence. We’ve more or less debunked this myth in our story about vintage watches in Italy, and would suggest that maybe the person who tells that story was, indeed, impressed with the magazine cover, but was otherwise projecting his experience onto the entirely Euorpean collecting community.

Whatever happened, this exotic-dial differs from the standard Daytona in a few ways, most notably within the registers that totalize the minutes and hours for the chronograph function, as well as display the running seconds hand. The indexes within these registers received large squares at their tips in an effort to improve legibility. Additionally, the numbers themselves were rendered in a different typeface that was slightly more stylized than a non-exotic dial (some call it a Bauhaus font, but that term gets kicked around kind of loosely). Finally, the minutes and seconds index around the perimeter of the dial was set against a contrasting background. In total, these changes make for a distinct vibe compared to the standard Daytona dial. 

The exotic dial would first appear in the 6239 reference in the 1.6M range of serial numbers. Rolex would go on to produce the 6240, 6241, 6262, 6264, 6263, and 6265 references into the mid ‘80s. While these were known and understood prior to the sale of Paul Newman’s own Daytona in 2017, that now legendary auction served as a lightning rod for collectors, propelling prices ever upwards in the intervening years.

Below is a selection of the best “Paul Newman” Daytona references—in various configurations—available on the market now. You can find more information on Paul Newman’s own Daytona right here on Robb Report.