SIXTY AND STILL SWINGING

TAG Heuer celebrates the diamond jubilee of its most iconic design, the Carrera, with an epic new chapter

- KC YAP

BORN TO RACE The story of the TAG Heuer Carrera is an ongoing odyssey of iconoclastic innovation that began in the early 1960s when a young Jack Heuer, freshly installed as the company’s chief executive, attended the 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida, a race timed by Heuer. There he met Grand Prix motor-racer Pedro Rodriguez, whose young sons were already on the path to becoming successful racing drivers.

They told him about a race in their home country of Mexico called the Carrera Panamericana, a furiously fast and extremely dangerous road race that ran on five occasions in the early 1950s before it was cancelled. Intrigued by the speed, emotion, and romance of the race, Jack decided that it would make a good name for one of his new lines of wristwatch chronographs.

“Carrera” was a word with multiple meanings and could be translated as “race,” “career,” or simply “path,” making it the perfect name for a timepiece with a racing spirit aimed at a young, stylish, upwardly mobile generation in tune with the increasingly liberated tastes of the 1960s.

At the same time, Jack was a production engineer with a specialty in electrical engineering, having studied at the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He was culturally curious too, and had developed an interest in the work of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and the furniture designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and had even saved up to buy an Eames lounge chair for his dorm room. In the work of these two icons, he saw a compelling marriage of modernism, function, beauty, and the ability to create a signature style. All this would be carried over into the watch designs that he oversaw – and into the Heuer Carrera.