REVOLUTION_International_Vol 54

THE TAG HEUER
CARRERA 160 YEARS
SILVER LIMITED EDITION
TAG Heuer dedicates its 160th anniversary to the Carrera, a watch birthed
from the mind of the one and only Jack Heuer.
WORDS DARREN HO
Jack Heuer writes in his autobiography, The Times
of My Life, that in January of 1962, having lent the
organizers of the race a handful of Heuer pocket
watch chronographs with split seconds, he was invited by the
Sports Car Club of America to attend the 12 Hours Race at
Sebring in Florida.
Where endurance racing is concerned, the Sebring
track was the place to be. It saw notable names from both
the professional and amateur circuits descend, including
the likes of German racer, Jochen Rindt, the Mexican racing
brothers, Pedro and Ricardo Rodriguez, and even the actorturned
race-car driver, Paul Newman.
While at the track, Jack mostly hung out at the Ferrari
pits. He clearly had a personal inclination towards the
Prancing Pony, as he spent enough time at their pits to get
acquainted with the parents of the Rodriguez brothers, who
were piloting for Ferrari that year.
Jack writes, “They [parents of the Rodriguez brothers]
told me that they were lucky that their boys were so young —
Pedro was then 21 and Ricardo 19 — because if they had been
born a few years earlier they would certainly have participated
in the dangerous race across Mexico known as the Carrera
Panamericana Mexico. At the time it was considered to be
the most dangerous sports car race in the world and over
a period of five years had claimed over 30 victims. It was
called off in 1955 because of safety concern, a decision no
doubt reinforced by the disaster at Le Mans the same year.”
It was at Sebring that Jack first encountered the word
Carrera, and now, as history holds, it clearly left a deepseated
impression on him. Jack writes, “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’.”
DESIGNING THE CARRERA
As a student, Jack Heuer had developed an interest and love
for modern design. He writes that he loved the works of
furniture designers Le Corbusier and Charles Eames, and
architects such as Eero Saarinen and Oscar Niemeyer. Jack
shares that, in fact as a student, he even saved enough to buy
himself an Eames lounge chair, which he admits, looked
oddly out of place in his student accommodation.
When time came to design the first watch of his career
in the industry, as majority shareholder of Heuer, he applied
principles that he learned from following the works of these
world-renowned designers to his own creation.
Jack starts off sharing that wristwatch chronographs
were popular in those days (in the midst of the Second
World War), particularly among the military and artillery
officers who used their chronograph wristwatches to
calculate distances and synchronize attack times with troops
on the ground. “Many of these chronographs were equipped
with artillery telemeters with spiral scales which made their
dials difficult to read. I wanted a dial that had a clear, clean
design, and a new technical invention came to my aid.”
Jack elaborates, “A manufacturer of plastic watch
crystals had invented a steel tension ring that fitted
inside the crystal and kept it under tension against the
surrounding steel case, thereby greatly increasing the
A close-up shot of
the new Carrera 160
Years Silver Limited
Edition’s dial. The
sunray brushed
dial contrasts
with the circular
graining of the three
counters, and the
polished angled
hands and applied
indexes add to its
sophistication. The
small seconds hand
and chronograph
indicators are all in
black and a vintage
lume is applied
to the hands and
indexes as well.
88 THE MODERNIST