TAG Heuer and Porsche announced their sixth watch today, celebrating their two-year partnership with the bold and sporty new TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Porsche Orange Racing.
If orange is your color, this watch has your number and then some. The bright orange seconds hands, sub-dial hands and surrounds, outer track, crown accent, and even stitches on the woven leather strap stand out against the black DLC steel case with a black ceramic tachymeter fixed bezel. The tachymeter stands out as well, this time in white, matching the white five-minute intervals on the dial and white lume of the hands. But if you have any doubt about what brand had a hand in this watch, take a look again at the orange on the bezel. If you’re reading your tachymeter and you’re going any faster than 400 kilometers per hour, according to the bezel, your speed is just “PORSCHE”.
Inside the 44mm wide case is the workhorse Heuer Calibre 02, an automatic column wheel chronograph movement finished in Côtes de Genève that can be seen through the sapphire glass case back. The weight also says “Porsche” and “TAG Heuer” in orange on the black-treated weight to tie the design together from front to back. The new TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Porsche Orange Racing runs $7,050 and is available immediately.
This might be sacrilege to admit in the pages of Hodinkee but I wasn’t a Porsche guy until just a few years ago. I always thought that Ferraris or (I shudder to think) Lamborghinis were the coolest sports cars on the market. But one day Cole Pennington took me for a ride in his 911 Targa and my view of the car world was upended. It’s been “Porsche, Porsche, Porsche” from that moment on. And while the Porsche of my dreams comes in a nice deep green, TAG Heuer makes a decent argument for orange with their newest watch.
The watch itself is a good example of the push and pull facing both TAG Heuer and Porsche. For both brands, half their audience will like the old hits, and the other half will want the best new technology. And while the new TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Porsche Orange Racing doesn’t have the COSC-certified flyback variant of the Heuer Calibre 02, it’s still a great movement – a baseline Carrera and not the track-ready supercar version. It’s a watch that makes a perfect daily driver to signal your love of two brands whose history has been intertwined for nearly 70 years.
It seems like the watch was imagined with great attention to the little details that tie everything together. The orange-accented strap wears comfortably and nods at racing design in a way that says “speed.” In fact, the play between the orange accents and the black case keeps your eye moving around the dial and I think will make the watch enjoyable to look at and wear for the long term.
My only concern with the black DLC steel case is that it seems to pick up smudges very quickly, but then again what is a good watch or car without some sign that it’s been loved and used to its full potential?
