NOUGHT TO SIXTY

12th June 2024

Jack Heuer’s brilliantly legible motorist’s chronograph careers onward, six decades young. Words by Alex Doak.

It takes a week-long Bullet Train tour to appreciate the sprawling extent of Japan’s biggest watchmaker. Doubly appropriate since the first rails were laid as far back as 1964 for the Tokyo Olympics – the very same event for which Seiko, as official timekeeper, successfully reduced the size of a quartz timekeeper from the proportions of a cupboard to a handheld box. Five years later, they’d shrunk the technology even more, launching the world’s first quartz wristwatch.

Around the same time, a self-admittedly wet-behind-the-ears Jack Heuer was conducting a similarly peripatetic campaign over in the US, not only rescuing his Swiss family’s historic marque by leveraging its mastery of precision watchmaking about motorsport’s golden age (the 12-hour Sebring race proving particularly perspicacious) but also steering Heuer SA devotedly through the ‘Quartz Crisis’ – a crisis that Seiko’s seminal ‘Astron’ had sparked so devastatingly in 1969.

Regardless of all those pictures of Steve McQueen wearing a blue-dial Monaco, Jack’s posterboy was the circular Carrera, all along – stoically mechanical and a crucible for Heuer’s revolutionary self-winding ‘Calibre 11’ chronograph. It was developed alongside Breitling and launched the very same year, in both Switzerland and Manhattan.

Opportunity, reactivity and patience was what it took. For a start, Jack had an eye for what Heuer’s speciality, the utilitarian stopwatch could grow into, post-war. Cue Heuer’s dashing triptych of ‘driver’s watches’, all stemming from the dashboard with equally dashing names: 1962’s ‘Autavia’ (the ‘avia’ a reference to Heuer’s piloting pedigree); the ‘Carrera’ of 1964; then aforementioned square-jawed ‘Monaco’.

Racy designs that worked their way onto the wrists of actual F1 pilots. Standard podium fodder today, but revolutionary back then – down in no small part to a wholesale deal with Switzerland’s F1 star turned pitlane hustler, Jo Siffert. His wheels and deals even resulted in McQueen’s aforementioned choice for Le Mans (1971), modelling his character, as he did, on Siffert himself.

“I wanted a dial that had a clear, clean design,” Jack explains of Carrera’s genus, in his memoirs, “and a new technical invention came to my aid.”

A manufacturer of plastic watch domes (no sapphire crystals existed then) had invented a steel tension ring that fitted around the inside to keep the dome pressed against the surrounding steel case, increasing the degree of water resistance. But it wasn’t water that Jack was up against – it was legibility: “I decided to use the inside bevel of this tension ring to carry the markings measuring one-fifths of a second… Sixty separate one-minute divisions would allow the wearer to set a marker for a defined interval of less than one hour.”

“I loved not only its sexy sound but also its multiple meanings, which include road, race, course and career. All very much Heuer territory! ”

Before, during and immediately after the war, chronographs had busy dials, crowded with scales: tachymeters, telemeters, pulsometers, logarithmic spiral ‘snail’ scales… Jack Heuer swept all this away and bathed a cleaner design in light. Hence the prominent ‘box crystal’ solution revived so brilliantly in 2023’s opening salvo of 60th-anniversary Carrera specials (pictured here, £6,100).

Its no-nonsense layout earned instant endorsement from motorsport royalty, aided in large part by a design far suaver than the chunky-bezelled Autavia of 1962, plus its borrowing its name from Mexico’s notoriously dangerous Carrera Panamericana road rally.

“I loved not only its sexy sound but also its multiple meanings, which include road, race, course and career. All very much Heuer territory! So as soon as I got back to Switzerland I rushed to register the name under “Heuer Carrera’.”

‘Carrera’, though, wasn’t a label limited to just car races and car watches. Having won the Panamericana in 1954, a carmaker from Stuttgart dubbed its iconic ‘911’ (back then ‘901’) coupé of 1964 also as ‘Carrera’ in tribute – a nomenclature that, bar the semi-convertible Targa model (named after a Sicilian race) continues today.

Considering this namesake connection, let alone the fact McQueen drove a 917 in Le Mans, it’s a wonder it’s taken so long for TAG Heuer and Porsche to become official bedfellows… if you don’t count all the intervening high-octane hook-ups:

Carrera wearers have included every Ferrari F1 driver of the Seventies, thanks to Heuer’s groundbreaking sponsorship of the Prancing Horse. Today, TAG Heuer continues to burn rubber aboard the wrist of Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing, as well as strapped to brand-ambassador-of-dreams Ryan Gosling, whose short film ‘The Chase for Carrera’ could have been a cringe, but is genuinely worth YouTubing – for every second of its five minutes. Plus, of course, co-branded with Porsche’s victorious Formula E team.

All worlds that easily outstrip a bullet train.

TAG Heuer watches are available from ROX Newcastle.

The year? 1972. The man? Jack Heuer of course. On his wrist? A panda-dial Calibre 11 (hence left-hand crown) Carrera chronograph. And round his neck? The brand-new Heuer Microsplit – the world’s first digital stopwatch. Either side of him? Swedish racing legend Ronnie ‘SuperSwede’ Peterson, then racing in March F1 cars team, plus Peterson’s future wife, Barbro. That day, at the German Grand Prix, he won the Jo Siffert Prix Rouge et Blanc Award for the “underdog” drive of the day, and Heuer presented him with the now-highly collectible gold-on-gold-bracelet ‘Pilot’ version of the Carrera chrono’, engraved with words ”SUCCESS RONNIE PETERSON FROM JACK W. HEUER.” It went on to sell for $230,000 at Sotheby’s in 2016 and is now in the TAG Heuer Museum.

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