Independents

nickd
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Prep time...

I think you've hit one of the major nails on the head with the phrase "prep time".

There's been an interesting little discussion about the chronometrié results, with one of the observations being that the results indicate the ability of the company entering the watch to "prepare" it - adjust and regulate it - rather than the intrinsic chronometric qualities of the movement or design.  Interestingly, this was one of the observations of the original competitions, as these rarified heights of adjusting are extremely time consuming and expensive.  The person doing the adjusting was the key factor in the success, and their success was to a certain extent determined by the companies willingness and ability to pay their high salary and allow themself the luxuy of their highest paid employee spending the vast majority of their time tweaking one or two movements to scrape milliseconds of performance.  The original competitions noted the name of the regulator, and if you look at results year to year, you often see that the same person scores extremely well even though they've changed company and are submitting different movements. 

G&F have a huge interest in winning these competitions, as an extremely complicated, supposedy uber-precision watch costing many hundreds of thousands but that is merely an extremely good timekeeper is difficult to justify even by the extremes of watch collecting madness.  So I'm willing to bet that G&F are putting an enormous effort behind adjusting so as to win, which does raise the question of whether they have an intrinsicaly uber-precise watch, or a watch that has the potential to go that little bit further with extreme levels of adjustment.

The real test of the design and their manufacturing quality is when their "production" watches are consistently in the uber-precision stratosphere, but as they won't publish data we'll never know.

nick