Festina Watches Review (Extra) - The Watch Banned from The Tour De France
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Festina are a Swiss brand best known for producing wristwatches. You may have seen their recent advertisements featuring their ambassador, Hollywood actor Gerard Butler.
Despite this recent shift towards lifestyle marketing, for years Festina sponsored sporting events including the famous Tour De France bicycle race. In fact, for 12 years they had their own professional cycling team, racing under the Festina banner.
Festina Cycling Team - Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Coming into the 1998 season, Festina had a star-studded line-up and were considered by many the number one cycling team on the planet. However, a shocking event would seal the fate of this once popular squad. Days before the start of the 1998 Tour De France event, officials discovered a large haul of over 400 doping products in one of the Festina support cars, including performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids. Camera teams were present to beam the embarrassing footage of their banning around the world.
Major investigations followed, which ultimately resulted in several teams withdrawing from the race and a string of arrests being made. By December 2000, all of the Festina riders had admitted to using these drugs during the contest and jail sentences were handed out to several Festina staff members.
While doping was suspected to be in widespread usage at this point, the incident nonetheless destroyed the reputation of the Festina team and led to their demise less than 12 months later.
Production
Despite the tarnishing of their brand name, Festina has continued to produce wristwatches to this day. You may believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity and funnily enough, it’s from a documentary about this incident that I first heard of the brand.
Photo Credit: Patrick Kovarik /AFP
When doing my research, I found very little information about the brand and its production processes. If Watch Wiki is to be believed, this brand now produces their watches in three different countries; Spain, Switzerland and Japan. The latter operation being reportedly handled by Citizen, which is no surprise given that this brand is known to use their Miyota movements.
Whatever the case, I found there were no reviews on YouTube so I decided to grab one of these and make my own, in case you were considering this brand.
Packaging
I took a look online and got Amazon to send me this retro-looking dress model, which I thought looked pretty attractive on the stock images. A day or two later it arrived. Let’s see how these watches stack up.
It arrived in a flat faux leather box, emblazoned with the Festina logo. The watch was just lying down within, so some extra protection would have been appreciated, to prevent any damage.
Nevertheless, it still arrived in one piece and upon first impressions, I really like the aesthetic.
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Watch Design
It has a truly vintage vibe and almost reminds me of some of the Orient Bambino models, but smaller. Indeed this has classic sizing, with a diameter at a shade under 36mm and a slim 9.6mm thickness, which includes the domed crystal. The comparatively standard 44mm lug to lug size makes this feel more like a 38mm watch, but either way, this is still definitely for those after a mid-century look.
On-wrist, it does an excellent job of imitating a traditional vintage watch, though it comes with more modern construction. You have a stainless-steel case, combined with a stainless steel bracelet; the former appearing in a fully polished finish. This suits the dressier look of the piece and it looks quite sleek and refined as it catches the light on-wrist. As you might expect for a dress-watch with a snapback case, you’re only going to get a limited 3bar water resistance, which isn’t enough to tackle any sort of prolonged water exposure.
Strap
By default, this watch comes on either a leather strap or a steel band and as you can see, I opted for the latter. This is an expandable one, which comes with its upsides and downsides. Due to the nature of these, they have the potential to easily trap and grab hairs, especially when putting the watch on. Nevertheless, they are possibly the fastest to use, when adjusted correctly and can be extremely comfortable.
This Festina also came with a rather unusual link and clasp system that I’ve not seen before. Not only does this feature removable links on each end, but the clasp also houses a total of 9 micro-adjustment holes, to ensure the perfect fit. While this is very useful, despite being a tad tricky to process at first, it does have one downside. If your wrists are any smaller than mine, this isn’t going to fit. My wrists are 6.25 inches and I had to remove all the additional links and push each end to the very central micro-adjustment holes, to make the band as short as possible; at which point, it just fits nicely. For those with larger sized wrists, you’re going to have no issues finding the perfect size, but if you have tiny wrists, you may want to opt for the leather version.
Construction
My main gripe with the build quality is the overall weight. True, this watch does use a quartz movement, which is never going to add a ton of heft. However, considering it’s all stainless steel, it doesn’t feel quite as premium as you’d want it to. This does have the side benefit of making the watch very light and comfortable, but I thought it was worth a mention as the bracelet, in particular, feels quite tinny; almost plasticky.
The look of the watch is what will either make or break it for you though. From a side-on perspective, that heavily domed crystal stands proudly above the dial. In an attempt to fully embrace the retro aesthetic, this is acrylic crystal, which provides no noticeable distortion until you reach particularly steep angles. This looks awesome but won’t be scratch-resistant; despite that it can be polished at a later date. Considering I paid around £70, that isn’t so bad and at least the excuse that it’s for aesthetics actually holds some weight with this piece.
Dial
It’s complemented by the similarly curved dial, which has an off-white colour; reminiscent of a pearlescent ivory tone. The sunburst effect looks brilliant for such a budget watch, it makes the watch look much more premium, especially at a passing glance. It features gold-coloured faceted indices at each hour, as well as a gold F logo below the 12 o’clock position; indicating that this is indeed a Festina. To fit the minimalist look, this watch has no minute track and instead has a clean second subdial positioned just below the central stem. This reduces the visual clutter and limits the possibility of the second hand missing the markers; which is a common occurrence with these lower-end quartz movements. In terms of accuracy, you will still get excellent performance compared to similarly priced automatic watches, though perhaps you don’t get the same raw bang for the buck compared to some rival mechanical offerings.
In terms of finishing though, for the most part, it competes with the big boys in this price range. Alignment of the applied areas is on-point and other areas such as the printing and polishing are fairly decent too.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I’ve been quite impressed by this model, which they’re labelling as part of their ‘extra’ range on the dial. Since checkout, this has gone down closer to £60 on Amazon, which I think is good value for this style of watch. You get that retro look, without the risks of buying vintage.
Despite this, there’s no way I’d pay the £139 price tag that came with the watch. When you get to that price point, there is just too much competition out there to justify buying a basic quartz watch. For around £100, there is the similarly styled bambino range, which offers a mechanical movement. I reviewed one of those in this blog post if you want to read it next.
