Celebrating 60 years of the TAG Heuer Carrera... with Ryan Gosling

As if the whole Barbie/Oppenheimer thing didn’t make for a strange enough year in Hollywood, did Ryan Gosling actually make an entire film about a watch? Yes, he did. Well, a short one at least. The Chase for Carrera is a five-minute comedy caper in honour of the 60th birthday of TAG Heuer’s Carrera watch. As Gosling also wears multiple versions of the watch as Ken in the Barbie movie, this made for a marketing department’s dream. I mean, how many products get premiere parties for their birthday?

If it sounds like we’re talking about Porsche 911s, we’re not, well, not yet. Porsche and (pre-TAG) Heuer started using the name Carrera separately, but for the same reason. Both were captivated by tales of the cross-Mexico Carrera Panamericana that ran for five deadly years in the early Fifties. The first Heuer Carrera was unveiled in 1963, and sharing a birth year with the 911 means another unintended link with Porsche. A couple of years ago, when the two companies suddenly announced they had started working together, most people thought, “Great, but I thought you always did”.

Heuer has been involved with motor racing since the beginning. The company started as one watchmaker in a small Swiss town in 1860. But young Edouard Heuer had big ideas and set about inventing new stuff. He thought up an ingenious keyless winding system and then in 1887 he patented the ‘oscillating pinion’ for chronographs – a smooth stop-start clutch so advanced that it is still used today. Heuer tested his stopwatches at horse and greyhound races, then when motor racing got going, he was all over it.

The first chronographs were handheld, but later Edouard’s son Charles-Auguste designed them specifically for cars and aeroplanes. The Time of Trip came out in 1911 and told the time of day, plus a 12-hour stopwatch function. This was followed by more sophisticated two- and sometimes three-dial rally timers, dashboard mounted timers that were the early 20th century hand-wound equivalent of a race computer. They had all the necessary info, and if the ongoing market in retro-themed timers is anything to go by, they were ahead of their time too.

Edouard Heuer had been a brilliant watchmaker, but his great-grandson Jack is a design and marketing genius. When he started working for the company in the late Fifties, the majority of its trade was still timing devices, but Jack saw an opening to expand the wristwatch offering. He brought out the racing focused Autavia in 1962, the Carrera the following year, and the Monaco in 1969.

Jack got Steve McQueen to wear a Monaco in the 1971 film Le Mans – giving that watch poster status for life – but the only reason he chose the Monaco was because at the time it wasn’t selling well and he had a box of them handy. Jack’s favourite was always the Carrera, and he befriended F1 drivers like Mario Andretti, Niki Lauda and Jochen Rindt, persuading them to buy his watches at discounted prices. Imagine that; nowadays drivers get paid to wear watches, back then they just got a few quid off.

As a motor racing fan, Jack understood the need for clarity and simplicity in a watch. A watch must be legible under all conditions, at any speed. The dial layout of the Carrera was modelled on the layout of racing instruments, with no extraneous detail to get in the way of the two or three subdial layout. The design DNA of those early watches is clearly visible next to the newer lineup, albeit they were a more modest 36mm, whereas most of the modern versions are between 39mm and 44mm.

The watch was a big success from its launch, and quickly became Heuer’s bestselling model. But by the end of the Seventies the effect of cheap quartz watches flooding in from around the world threatened to destroy the mechanical watch market. Heuer was bought first by Piaget, and the Carrera was discontinued in 1984. The following year TAG, a Swiss company making turbochargers for F1 among other things, bought up Heuer and at this point the future for mechanical watches looked dim.

By the Nineties things looked very different. Quartz watches were everywhere and you could buy one for less than the price of a compact disc. But that left an opening for watches that were not cheap and throwaway. The watch market surged back along with the now TAG Heuer, and in 1996, after a dozen-year hiatus, the Carrera was rereleased. Jack Heuer was also lured back to use his name and his advice, and has been an honorary chairman for the brand ever since, despite celebrating his 90th birthday last year.

This year has seen a whole load of celebration models to add to the already extensive line-up. Taking a deep breath, you can have your Carrera: with or without a chronograph, as a Porsche limited edition, in different combos of steel, gold, ceramic and carbon and titanium, and even – and this doesn’t sound very race ready – one fully covered in diamonds. Prices start at £2,350 and head up to around £20k or so for a tourbillon and pushing £50k for the fully iced Carrera.

Just how many different combos of this watch you can buy tells us something comforting. In the past 60 years the world has undergone an electronic and digital revolution that is now busy hypnotising youngsters with Snapchat and TikTok. But as each new generation discovers the enduring coolness of old analogue stuff, perhaps we should just relax and stop worrying about where the world is heading. Think less, enjoy more... Ken would approve.