FIRST IMPRESSIONS: TAG Heuer Formula 1 'Carbon Dial' Quartz Watch

CAZ101AC.FT8024

While the original resin cased TAG Heuer Formula 1s may not be everyone's cup of tea, they remain enormously popular on eBay and generally command at least double their original list price, in some cases many times more. Clearly then something was very 'right' about those watches and it doesn't take an in depth survey to realise that one of, if not the most attractive element of those original 'plastic' watches was the bright colours they came in. Quite simply, they had the 'fun' factor in spades.

Contrarily of course, my own resin-cased 1980s Formula 1 is black, with a black dial and a black strap - but I do intend to add a more colourful model to my collection at some point, although it may have to wait a little while since this brand new F1 model is grabbing my attention pretty damn hard just at the moment!

Bright colours aside, I'm a sucker for a carbon fibre effect dial, and there really haven't been all that many TAG Heuer's which have that feature, in fact I can only think of two off the top of my head, one is a limited edition Monaco and the other is my titanium cased Carrera... and of course those 'carbon' Aquaracers that came out last year.

It's funny, really... I'm quite sure this, the limited edition Monaco and my Carrera have dials which 'mimic' carbon fibre, so it's odd that such a fuss was made about the dials on the Aquaracers wasn't it? I mean I was as guilty as everyone else, but I think the key difference was that those watches had some genuine carbon elements and as such it seemed more deceitful to have a 'faux' carbon dial. Also, it just wasn't done particularly well and it looked like newspaper print at high magnification!

CAZ101AC.BA0842

The watch comes on either a standard F1 bracelet (BA0842) or a perforated rubber strap (FT8024), and for my money it looks better with the strap. That said, if you are unsure it's always cheaper in the long run to buy the watch on the bracelet and pick up the strap - I'm pretty sure I enquired about this rubber strap last year and it was relatively inexpensive. I think that's what I would do, although I'm pretty sure it would end up on the rubber strap fairly indefinitely. It works better with the yellow rehaut and that is where my hesitation comes with this watch.

Don't get me wrong, I really like it and I think it looks great. I really hope the yellow is nice and bright and it pops off the dial in exactly the way the Aston Martin totally didn't. But for me, personally... I can't help thinking that as I already have a carbon fibre dial Carrera and a yellow dial Aquaracer Calibre S, isn't this too much like just combining two watches that I already have in my collection?

Leaving that aside though I still think TAG Heuer are onto a winner here, this is probably the best looking Formula 1 we've seen since... well, since the blue dial Red Bull! The only thing I have noticed is that the batons are a bit all over the place, cut to different lengths to accommodate the date wheel and chronograph dials, but that's no different on the Red Bull, it just seems to jump out at me more here for some reason.

I like that they've gone with a red running seconds hand, but the 'Formula 1' text could have been white/grey to match the 'TAG Heuer' text on the left hand side of the 1/10 subdial, that bit of red isn't really adding anything and it looks quite hard to read on these pictures. This watch also has a ceramic bezel which is a welcome inclusion and I'm sure TAG Heuer will sell plenty of these - I just hope this isn't going to be another case of blink and you'll miss it, because that's getting kinda annoying now. Hopefully the fact that Goldsmiths have this on their website suggests there might be a reasonable amount of stock available for this one.

Price for the CAZ101AC.FT8024 is £1495 and £1650 for the CAZ101AZ.BA0842, which makes this a somewhat more affordable alternative to the Bell & Ross Renault Sport limited edition pieces you might have seen on Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hulkenberg's wrists last year...