Watches: from wallet-friendly to lavish

To mark its 160th anniversary, TAG Heuer has released important new versions of its storied Carrera chronograph. We spoke to Jack Heuer, the man who designed the original almost six decades ago, about how this watch went the distance

UNLIKE MANY DESIGN CLASSICS, TAG HEUER’S CARRERA DIDN’T START WITH A MOOD BOARD OR A SKETCH . Instead, in the beginning, was the word. ‘I found the name in 1962 before I even thought of the design,’ says the watch’s creator, Jack Heuer, now 87 years old and the company’s honorary chairman. Specifically, he found the name in Sebring, Florida, the location of the famous 12 Hours motorsport endurance race. His company was supplying pocket chronographs for the timing of the event. One day, in the Ferrari pits, he found himself talking to the parents of the drivers Pedro and Ricardo Rodriguez. They admitted how relieved they were that their boys were too young to have competed in a race that’d recently been cancelled because it was deemed the most dangerous in the world; the Carrera Panamericana. Heuer loved the sound of its name. He registered “Heuer Carrera” immediately.

The great-grandson of the company’s founder, Heuer had recently taken the reins at the watchmaker and wanted to put his design interests into practice. The as-yet-unrealised Carrera presented the perfect opportunity.

‘I knew it’d be a racing chronograph,’ he says, ‘so the dial needed to be uncluttered and easy to read by drivers at a glance at high speed.

Then, I used my knowledge of industrial design and refined it so it’d be both sporty and elegant. That’s probably the most unconventional part of its conception; using rules that usually apply to dials used in thermic power plants and taking advantage of a new watch-case construction presented by our best-case partner.’ Heuer refracted this creative impulse through his taste for midcentury design

– he loved the work of Le Corbusier, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and Oscar Niemeyer – which you can detect in the results of his labours: 1963’s Heuer Carrera chronograph.

In 1969, an automatic version appeared, powered by Heuer’s Chronomatic Calibre 11 movement. Developed secretly over three years in collaboration with Breitling, Hamilton-buren and Dubois Dépraz, this feat of engineering was the first automatic chronograph movement on the global market. In the decade that followed, the Carrera enjoyed a golden era thanks to its association with highprofile motorsport. Every Ferrari Formula One driver from 1971 to 1979 was offered a Carrera 1158CHN (standing for the colourway description “Champagne Noir”), engraved on the case back with their name, a message and, occasionally, their blood type

The “TAG Heuer Carrera 160 Years Montreal”, launched last June, forms part of a significant run of new Carreras that the watchmaker created to mark its 160th anniversary. The releases began last January with the “TAG Heuer Carrera 160 Years Silver”, a limited edition remaster of the original 1963 Carrera. Next came that Montreal (inspired by 1972’s collectable Heuer Montreal) and, later, two new evergreen models. Launched under the supervision of TAG Heuer’s new CEO Frédéric Arnault, the Carrera Sport Chronograph and the more recent Carrera Chronograph embrace the design heritage of the watch.

The Sport Chronograph is the most modern of all. Sure, you can detect its lineage, but those flickers of the past are incorporated into a fresh, dynamic look. Check its sporty, shortened lugs, for instance, and its bevelled ceramic bezel. Jack Heuer’s priority was legibility, and the bezel displays its tachymeter scale loud and clear. The whole thing has plenty of wrist presence: the piece is 44mm in diameter and is produced in four colourways. The most radical is the bangon-trend two-tone rose gold and black, green and blue versions, which the Carrera wears handsomely.

The Carrera Chronograph is an elegant, dressy piece that has all the simplicity of the 1963 model – note the tachymeterfree bezel – but updates the design with a 42mm case plus contemporary crown and pushers. You’ll notice numberless, small seconds at six o’clock, for instance, and a date window just below it; it has a lustrous dial (in either black, blue, grey or silver – the latter with rose-gold hands) and upscale band (either a brown alligator-leather strap or stainless-steel bracelet).

Powering all of these new Carrera models, however, is something unequivocally modern; the Calibre Heuer

02. This new manufacture movement offers a conveniently long 80-hour power reserve and employs a “column wheel and vertical clutch” mechanism for precise timing.