TAG Heuer’s New Carrera Puts a Vintage Stopwatch Back on the Grid

Mai Ikuzawa holds two titles at Team Ikuzawa, Team Principal and Creative Director, and the combination explains a great deal about the watch that follows. Her father founded the Japanese racing team in 1981. Where an heir might have preserved it under glass, she has done something more interesting: repositioned one of the country’s most distinctive motorsport legacies as a working cultural platform, one that now moves through fashion and luxury with the same authority it once commanded on the circuit. Central Saint Martins trained her, Tokyo’s racetracks raised her, and two decades between design studios and pit lanes have given her a fluency in both. She belongs to a generation of creative leaders rethinking how heritage names stay relevant, and she does it from inside the sport, with none of a marketer’s distance from it.

That perspective is what TAG Heuer bought into. For this second collaboration, Ikuzawa again partnered with George Bamford, whose Bamford Watch Department built its name reinterpreting the watches most houses consider untouchable. The two are friends as much as collaborators, and the piece carries the marks of genuine dialogue, well beyond the usual licensing arrangement. Their shared reference point is the Heuer Roadmaster, a stopwatch from TAG Heuer’s own timing history, prized in its day for legibility and graphic nerve, now studied closely and rebuilt through Team Ikuzawa’s contemporary eye.

The watch reinterprets the 39mm Carrera Glassbox in fine-brushed and polished steel, its domed sapphire and bezel-free construction opening the dial to an uninterrupted view that honours Jack Heuer’s original insistence on clarity above all. The dial arrives in white, textured with a fine Clou de Paris pattern, its indexes printed instead of applied, which keeps the stopwatch character intact. Two chronograph counters sit at 3 and 9 o’clock, and red runs throughout, on the faceted hands, the central chronograph seconds and an angled date disc at six o’clock where every numeral wears the Team’s signature shade. The hands and indexes carry white Super-LumiNova that glows green after dark, and the polished crown is finished with a red lacquered ring. Powering it all is the TH20-10 manufacture chronograph calibre, water-resistant to 100 metres.

The cleverest move sits at 6 o’clock, where the Team Ikuzawa signature occupies the space a running-seconds counter would normally fill. The TH20-10 makes this possible by omitting that display entirely, a decision that reaches back to the 1960s and 1970s, when TAG Heuer left dial space for the racing teams it timed. It reads as a small act of historical literacy, the kind that separates a considered collaboration from a mere coat of paint.

Details accumulate in the same register. The caseback carries dedicated Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department engravings alongside each piece’s individual number. The watch ships with a seven-row steel bracelet plus two further straps: perforated white leather with red stitching that echoes classic racing gloves, and a red-and-white textile in the Team’s livery. Everything arrives in packaging modelled on the toolboxes of a racing workshop, down to a travel pouch and a set of custom Team Ikuzawa charms for one’s keys. Limited to 150 numbered pieces, it continues a story that began in 2023 and understands precisely which parts of the past are worth carrying forward.

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