Maurice de Mauriac and Racquet magazine are back with their latest tennis-inspired timepiece just in time for the 2026 Australian Open, a blacked-out version of their Rallymaster watch inspired by the night sessions at the year’s first Grand Slam tournament — and another unlikely source.
“I was really thinking about the surf culture around Australia,” said designer Carlton DeWoody.
The Rallymaster IV keeps the 39mm case of past editions, but adds a black PVD coating, a black nylon with a single luminous white stripe down the center, and a black dial with a white net motif and one burst of color — neon purple, navy, light blue — in the seconds subdial. It all comes together into something edgier than you’d typically see in the tennis world and even with the various nods to tennis in the Rallymaster’s design, that surf inspiration is still apparent.
DeWoody has looked for inspiration in other sports since he started designing the first edition of the Rallymaster ahead of its 2022 release.
“A lot of my inspiration that looks like it’s tennis kind of came from other sports,” said DeWoody. “That tennis net motif was actually inspired by a racing chronograph. When you take the checkered flag and you kind of zero out to black and white, it becomes a grid. And that has a direct relationship to the grid of the net.”
The Rallymaster series has always been colorful, with past editions featuring pastel pinks and baby blues, but the Rallymaster IV may be the most eye-catching version.
“This latest one, I think, just looks like a completely different watch, even though it’s the same,” said DeWoody. “This idea of kind of really changing the case color to black and blacking it all out and really showing a different thing as opposed to just kind of changing the dial again I think was really important to me.”
DeWoody says he also set out to capture the spirit of tennis stars who broke the mold of the “typical ‘tennis whites’ kind of player” like Andre Agassi, the Williams sisters, and members of a “new generation” of players who are also pushing tennis fashion forward. Not to mention Maurice de Mauriac and Racquet magazine themselves, whom DeWoody says “challenge the status quo” in the same way the new Rallymaster does.
“There is a little bit of, I would say, rebel in this watch,” said DeWoody.
DeWoody said this will be the final Rallymaster tied to one of tennis’ four major tournaments, but there’s already been one more edition than the name Rallymaster IV suggests — an edition created for the Korean Open that DeWoody jokingly refers to as the Rallymaster 3.5 — and DeWoody said there may be other opportunities for Rallymaster collaborations inspired by other elements of the sport. He hinted that there has been “talk of doing a chronograph.”
“The design itself is very chrono inspired, so I think we are probably going to see a chronography, wink wink, in the future,” said DeWoody.
The Rallymaster IV is 39mm in diameter and 12mm thick with a 47.2mm lug-to-lug. It is powered by an automatic Landeron movement that has a 40 hour power reserve. Like past editions, the Rallymaster IV is limited to 100 pieces. The pre-order window opened Jan. 15 and the watch can be purchased for $2,750. Maurice de Mauriac
Alec Dent
2026-01-20 15:00:00