The Rolex GMT-Master II 'Pepsi' Is Officially Dead. Long Live The King!

For eight years, the Rolex GMT-Master II ref. 126710BLRO was the single most wanted steel sports watch on the planet. A watch that turned grown men into nervous, over-spending regulars at their local AD, desperately building “purchase history” in the hope of one day being offered the privilege of paying retail for a blue and red bezel.

That era is over.

As Watches and Wonders 2026 kicked off in Geneva on April 14, Rolex quietly confirmed what the entire industry had been bracing for. Visit the 126710BLRO product page on rolex.com right now and you’ll be greeted with a platinum Day-Date and four words: “This page is not available.”

Navigate to the GMT-Master II configurator and you’ll find three steel bezel options remaining: grey and black, blue and black, and green and black. No red. No blue. No Pepsi.

The writing had been on the wall since February, when we confirmed that Rolex had informed authorised dealers there would be no further Pepsi deliveries.

Customers on waiting lists were told to look elsewhere. Major AD websites, including Rolex-owned Bucherer, had already scrubbed the blue and red colourway from their pages while every other GMT variant stayed put. But until Rolex pulled the actual product page from its own site, there was always room to argue otherwise. That room no longer exists.

The secondary market had already been pricing it in. Chrono24 reported a 500 per cent surge in purchase requests for the 126710BLRO in the first week of March alone. Median prices in Australian dollars climbed from around $31,000 to over $35,600 in six months.

Bloomberg’s Subdial Watch Index tracked a roughly US$3,000 jump since the start of the year, while active listings dropped by a quarter. People who’d spent years trying to buy this watch at retail suddenly found themselves competing with people willing to pay anything.

The Pepsi colourway has been part of the GMT-Master story since the very beginning, debuting on the original ref. 6542 in 1955 as a tool for Pan Am pilots tracking multiple time zones.

Red for day, blue for night. It ran through the ref. 1675, the ref. 16710, and then disappeared from the steel catalogue entirely between 2007 and 2018 when Rolex moved to ceramic bezels and hadn’t yet cracked a blue and red Cerachrom insert.

When the steel ceramic Pepsi finally arrived at Baselworld 2018 on a Jubilee bracelet, it became an instant cultural object and poster child for the speculation boom. One of the defining watches of the modern Rolex era, full stop. Personally, it didn’t make me moist, but when we tried it on, that all changed. It was an instant classic.

The question now is what fills the gap. Rolex filed a patent in 2022 describing a process for producing a red and black ceramic bezel insert. The “Coke” colourway, named after the black and red bezel that debuted on the original GMT-Master II ref. 16760 “Fat Lady” in 1982, hasn’t been part of the catalogue since 2007.

Every major watch publication has predicted its return in ceramic for each of the past four or five years running.

Whether a Coke walks in or Rolex lets the absence linger, the 126710BLRO has already cemented its legacy. It was the watch that launched a thousand waitlists and turned the modern steel sports Rolex from a timepiece into a financial instrument. For better or worse.

For now, you’ll just have to wait and watch Pepsi GMT prices on Chrono24 skyrocket. As of today, there’s some on there for up to $127,000. That’s 6x retail price. Wow!