Review: TAG Heuer Carrera Heuer-02T
If you’ve got over ten grand to spend on a watch, you’d most likely be looking in the direction of Rolex, Breguet, or maybe even an older Patek Philippe—but there’s certainly one place you won’t be looking: TAG Heuer. There’s another place you won’t be looking as well, and that’s to high complications, perpetual calendars, tourbillons and the like. But could the Heuer-02T change all that?
I don’t want to come across as demeaning or dismissive, but TAG Heuer is quite often considered an entry point into luxury watchmaking. They sit somewhere between the fashion watches and the more expensive brands in the jewellers’ window, skirting the no-man’s-land of pricing that could tempt someone out of a Gucci or Michael Kors into a—inverted commas—proper watch, but is unlikely to talk someone down from a pricier offering from Omega or Breitling.
That’s not a slander, that’s just the way things are right now, and it’s a shame, because TAG Heuer—the watchmaker formally known as Heuer—has made some serious contributions to the bubble of mechanical watchmaking, not just back in the day, but presently as well. If anything, TAG Heuer has contributed more in the “TAG” phase of its existence than before, and here lies the source of much of the brand’s maligning.
Back before the days of TAG, Heuer sought its business in the field of motor racing. When stopwatches became wristwatches, Heuer did what many others did and stopped making its own products and sourcing them from catalogues instead. A movement here, a case there, a dial to go with it. The TAG Heuer Carrera, perhaps one of the brand's most famous watches, was picked out of a catalogue, the Monaco too. Rolex, Breitling, and even in some cases, despite being an absolute giant, Omega, all did the same thing. And IWC, Jaeger LeCoultre, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe—all these brands bought parts in in some way or another through the middle of the twentieth century. It was just how things were done.
The impact Heuer had was more of a cultural one. Formula 1, Le Mans, Jo Siffert, Jackie Ickx, Steve McQueen, Monaco, Silverstone, Monza—Heuer was the figurehead of motorsports timing, as much a part of the scenery at a race weekend as the cars and drivers themselves. Heuer in fact spearheaded the now-inseparable partnership of wristwatches and racing cars … by getting racing driver Jo Siffert to flog watches to other drivers on the paddock to help fund his ailing Porsche dealership, but that’s neither here nor there.
Heuer was founded in 1860, St-Imier, Switzerland
By comparison, modern Heuer, post-TAG Heuer, has introduced more to mechanical watchmaking than most other brands out there. After the purchase by holding company Techniques d’Avant Garde—yes, the very same Techniques d’Avant Garde that partnered with Porsche to build the monster F1 turbo engines of the 1980s—the watchmaker, like many of the era, found itself in a period of change. Mechanical watches were no longer needed thanks to quartz, and that quite simply ruined everything.
Well, not quite everything, because it turns out we have a bit of an affinity for mechanical watches. Just as an electric car is better than one fuelled with dinosaur juice in almost every way, quartz may have wiped the floor with mechanical in performance, but the romance just wasn’t there. Ticking wheels and coiling springs—there’s something about it that just feels right.
And that’s what modern TAG Heuer, to dispel its entry-level post-quartz reputation, has decided to capitalise on. The Carrera Mikro series, for example, pushed accuracy to a thousandth of a second, then two thousandths and even ten thousandths; the Monaco V4 rewrote the rule book with its incredible belt-driven movement; and now there’s this, the Heuer-02T, the tourbillon you can have for the price of a Daytona.
When you’ve got big money to spend on a watch—like tens, if not hundreds of thousands—and you’re looking for something truly special, you’ll probably find yourself considering one of the high complications. That’s minute repeaters, perpetual calendars, double chronographs—and tourbillons. These incredibly complex mechanisms are the pinnacle of watchmaking both modern and classical, the marks of a watchmaker’s ability to go toe-to-toe with the very best.
The TAG in TAG Heuer stands for Techniques d’Avant Garde. Techniques d’Avant Garde purchased a majority stake in Heuer, forming TAG Heuer in 1985
And all of these functions are not just very complicated but very old, too, dating back many centuries, posing the ultimate challenge in watchmaking through clocks, pocket watches and now wristwatches. The tourbillon, for example, is a 1795 invention brought about by the problem of the hanging pocket watch. The balance wheel, the part of a watch that beats back and forth to regulate the time, was found to be under the strain of gravity when on its side, and so watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet decided he could fix this.
The solution could have been just as simple as angling the balance wheel from parallel to perpendicular to the force of gravity, but that was far too inelegant for Breguet. Instead he figured that, since the ergonomics of the watch dictated the angle of the balance wheel, instead he would somehow make sure that no one face of this regulating organ would be presented to gravity more than any other. That’s like saying to reduce the wear of the sea on a boat, the boat must be constantly spinning as it goes forward—aka, an engineering nightmare.
And it was an engineering nightmare, but he achieved it, seating not just the balance, but the entire escapement within a secondary mechanism that was constantly rotating. He overcame the problems of increased mass, constant coupling, growing complexity—and he called his invention the tourbillon, French for whirlwind.
Even though a wristwatch, with its ever-changing position, no longer has a need for the tourbillon, it continues on anyway—much like the mechanical movement itself—as a totem of watchmaking muscle. For TAG Heuer, it’s an opportunity to lift itself out of that no-man’s-land between the fashion watches and what used to be its core rivals, Omega and Breitling. A Swiss tourbillon is typically asking many tens of thousands—for the Heuer-02T, it’s about the same price as a Rolex Daytona chronograph.
Tourbillon is French for whirlwind
Ok, so a Chinese tourbillon will cost half of that, but as an outlier that does not need to conform with the same quality or performance metrics—the Heuer-02T is chronometer certified, for example—it’s a bit like comparing a Supra that’s been cheaply tuned to 1000bhp versus a Bugatti Veyron. One can use the power all day every day, the other will end up as a paperweight after not too long.
And TAG Heuer has really engineered this thing for daily performance; it’s got 100m of water-resistance, has a column wheel chronograph, winds automatically and has a power reserve of 65 hours. The indices are luminous, the strap rubberised for comfort, the case fashioned in titanium for light weight. Everything about this watch urges you to wear it like you would a Carrera a tenth of the price, and it’s down to the quality of the build that allows TAG Heuer to do this—and still maintain chronometer certification.
Of the 230 parts in this movement, it’s of course the tourbillon that takes centre stage. There are micro weights on the rotor for fine adjustment as well as a titanium cage—and you can spec it with a carbon composite cage and even hairspring should you so choose. So, it’s not only the most affordable Swiss tourbillon on the market, but one of the only ones you can actually use every day as well.
What TAG Heuer is trying to do is an Audi, lifting itself out of its rut by producing an affordable flagship model that not only competes with its more expensive rivals, but puts them to shame. Just as the R8 demonstrated that supercars could be usable, practical and reliable—as well as affordable—TAG Heuer is doing the same for the tourbillon. The R8 was a huge success for Audi—can the Heuer-02T do the same for TAG Heuer?
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