Speed dial: TAG Heuer and Porsche partner up on racy new watch

TAG Heuer and Porsche have kicked off a new partnership with the release of a watch, the TAG Heuer Carrera Porsche Chronograph. The announcement has been a long time coming for the brands, whose histories have been interlinked since the 1950s.

Porsche won its class in the Carrera Panamericana race of 1954 and named its most powerful engine ‘Carrera’. The following decade, Jack Heuer created the first Heuer Carrera chronograph, putting their priorities in sync. It began a series of happenings, including the actor Steve McQueen celebrating both brands during the filming of the movie Le Mans in 1970 in his Porsche 917 and racing suit complete with Heuer logo. After the TAG group bought Heuer in the mid-1980s, the relationship with Porsche was cemented when the brands came together to produce the TAG-Porsche engine, which helped the McClaren racing team taking three consecutive F1 titles.

Now, the brands have announced this new watch is to mark the beginning of many joint enterprises. With a design based on TAG Heuer’s Carrera Sport Chronograph, the new piece also nods to Porsche in its red, black and grey colour palette and in its font for the indexes. A dial resembling asphalt, and Arabic numerals from the Porsche dashboard are energetic design ticks.

‘For TAG Heuer, the original watch helped inform our principles of design, with a highly legible dial, and a chronograph that represented measurements that were so quintessential to timekeeping and the link to motorsports,’ says Frédéric Arnault, CEO of TAG Heuer. ‘Now, for our new special edition, we’ve taken the best elements from our 60 years of history and are modernising them with Porsche’s design codes.’

Detlev von Platen from Porsche adds: ‘When we started to have this conversation and met for the first time, it quickly became evident that we were talking about the potential of having a unique partnership in bringing together two brands in the automotive watch industry. We found out that we don’t just share a similar mindset and approach, from our heritage with touch points throughout our history. We strive for precision, excellence, quality, and this desire for creating things in the future, in a world which is fast-changing.’

INFORMATION
tagheuer.com
porsche.com