Race for time

With its new Carreras, TAG Heuer appears to have pulled off the rarest of tricks – updating a heritage design in such a way that keeps both the vintage fans and modern watch lovers happy

Watches & Jewellery 8 Jun 2023

TAG Heuer brand ambassador actor Ryan Gosling stars in a new short promotional film for the latest Carrera release

Someone dressed as Ryan Gosling is being pursued by two men down a hotel corridor. He smashes through a third-floor window and out on to a crash mat – doubling as the pavement – below. ‘Keep the cameras rolling,’ shouts the director. ‘Go, go, go!’ The real Ryan Gosling swaps places with the stuntman and pretends to hyperventilate.

We are watching a film of Ryan Gosling making a film. ‘Get the Rubber Glass on him! And action, Ryan!’ Gosling stands up, dusts himself down and gives the big thumbs up. ‘Great, now tilt the watch to the light,’ says the director. Gosling adjusts his left wrist accordingly, displaying a handsome blue sports watch. It is the new TAG Heuer Carrera chronograph. ‘And, cut!’

Scene successfully in the can, the film crew applauds, and its star walks over to shoot the breeze with the director, whose name is David Leitch. ‘Hey, did you get the call about directing the TAG Heuer ad?’ Gosling asks Leitch. ‘I did,’ replies the director, enthusiastically. With the cameras still rolling, Gosling is then approached by prop master Tammy (Emmy-nominated comedian Vanessa Bayer) and asked if he can please return the watch to the props department. The actor begs for ‘a minute alone with it’, clicks the watch’s stopwatch function and then speeds off in a Porsche 911 Turbo. ‘Gosling took the watch again!’ Cue a hot pursuit around the film lot, featuring explosions, a runaway truck, a golf cart, a horse and bewildered extras dressed as gumshoe detectives.

This is The Chase for Carrera, a five-minute ad for TAG Heuer, which is both hugely entertaining and enormously self-aware. It includes several nods to well-known films – most obviously Gosling’s 2011 cult classic Drive, in which he plays an unnamed Hollywood stunt diver who moonlights as a getaway driver. David Leitch – playing himself – is the director of top-tier Hollywood action movies, including John Wick, Bullet Train and Hobbs & Shaw, the Fast & Furious spin-off. Leitch is a former stunt coordinator who got his break playing Brad Pitt’s stunt double in Fight Club. To complete the game of metatextual bingo, TAG Heuer’s Carrera is named after the Carrera Panamericana, the 1950s Mexican road race often described as the most dangerous ever staged. Porsche, famously, also has a car named the Carrera. In 2021 Porsche and TAG Heuer announced a long-term partnership.

Along with Rolex’s Daytona, Omega’s Speedmaster and Breitling’s Navitimer, the Carrera belongs in the top tier of wish-list chronographs – essentially, watches with a stopwatch function. It is also the one that has the most legitimate ties to motor racing. Before the company became TAG Heuer, it was Heuer – with a pioneering interest in time-measuring devices that dates back to 1908, the year it patented its Sphygmomanometer pocket chronograph, a device that allowed physicians to determine pulse rates. This was followed in 1911 by the Time of Trip car-dashboard chronographs.

In 1962 the company’s boss Jack Heuer, himself a driver and racing fan, was invited to Florida’s annual endurance race, 12 Hours of Sebring, as a thank-you for supplying stopwatches and timing devices to the event. There, Jack struck up a conversation with the parents of the Rodriguez brothers, two hotly tipped Ferrari divers from Mexico. The parents expressed relief that their sons had been too young to enter the Carrera Panamericana, which had ended in 1954 following the deaths of 27 racers and spectators.

The name stuck and in 1963 Jack released the first Heuer Carrera. Its design leaned into the watch boss’s love of Modernism – he’d become an advocate for the legibility of watch dials since taking a course on the subject at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Consequently, Jack Heuer’s new chronograph broke with the past. Its dial was simple and silver, its markings were clean and minimal and its emphasis was on its added function – the chronograph. It was an immediate hit.

There have been hundreds of variations in Carrera colours, dial layouts, date options and case materials ever since – by one account more than 500 (even counting a complete break in production between 1984 to 1996). Now, to mark the 60th anniversary of its flagship model, TAG Heuer has given the Carrera a sprightly upgrade. The dual goal has been to nod back to Jack’s 1963 model – those Sixties originals do brisk business on the secondary market – but also to create a watch with 2023 specs that doesn’t scream “retro”. ‘It’s a remix,’ TAG Heuer’s heritage director Nicholas Biebuyck says. ‘We’re taking the original interpretation of the Carrera, all the DNA, all of the philosophies that Jack stood for when he launched the model and really taking them back to principles, building back up again, to create this continuous identity from 1963 to 2023.’

The two most noteworthy versions, a blue and a black model, have distinct Sixties vibes. The black version comes in a “reverse panda” dial with a date at 12 o’clock. The blue version features a running seconds hand set into the dial with a date window at 6 o’clock.

The biggest point of difference is the so-called “glass box” construction: a domed, curved crystal that covers the entire watch face. The tachometer – the external ring of numbers used for measuring speed – sits beneath the glass. The idea is to make the watch more readable from all angles. Both models come with a tweaked version of the brand’s latest Heuer 02 movement, the most up-to-date calibre it makes. The watches measure 39mm and cost £5,600 – by no means silly money for one of a handful of watches that may genuinely be described as a design classic.

TAG Heuer has also announced a set of smaller, colourful Carreras in pastel green, “warm” silver, blue and vibrant pink, as well as another version of the “glass box” model with a tourbillon at 6 o’clock. More models will follow throughout the anniversary year.

The new Carreras were launched in April at this year’s Watches and Wonders show in Geneva, where 48 luxury watch brands announce their latest new models. Response from the global press for almost every release at the fair tends towards the hyperbolic – but even given that, it’s hard to think of another brand that received quite such blanket praise. Everyone loved these new Carreras.

TAG Heuer Carrera, from £2,750; tagheuer.com