You can put this one in the category of: We Didn?t See it Coming. Seiko has just launched a new Prospex branded version of a watch that can be described as a true cult hit of the early aughts, the Seiko Sportura Kinetic. If you?re scratching your head trying to remember the Sportura and coming up empty, perhaps you know it as ?the Jay Leno,? as the former Tonight Show host is fond of wearing one while tooling around in steam powered fire trucks from the 1910s, or whatever. The Sportura?s fans, though, are legion. Our co-founder Zach Weiss is a Sportura owner, and I don?t think he even drives a Duesenberg. 

The new watches are being framed as a new chapter in the ongoing story of Seiko as a timer of competitive sporting events, which dates back to the 1960s. The conceit of the Sportura was a deconstructed chronograph display that shows elapsed time in three separate dial displays, each covered with a small custom crystal, which must have been terribly expensive and difficult to fabricate. The new watches (there are four in total) are simpler, with a layout that consists of a main dial for the time at 6:00, with what amounts to a trio of subdials arcing over it that display elapsed time. On the new watches, everything is part of one dial, so we lose some of that weird disconnected feeling, but much of the aesthetic sensibility remains. 
Functionally, they?re a bit different from the originals, as you?d expect given advancements in movement tech. While Kinet...