CBN2A1F.FC6492
Harrods / London, 15th September 2021
This is the last of the three watches I tried on in Harrods on this hot September day and it's probably my favourite. Yet again it's a watch that doesn't show itself at its best in photographs, but it's not quite the revelation that the blue dial Dato 45 Carrera 160th Anniversary LE was (for example).
When TAG Heuer announced that they were going to collaborate with Porsche they unfortunately set up a lot of expectations. People were getting very excited about it and (for the most part) expecting 'Heritage' this and 'Retro' that, but to be honest when I think of Porsche I don't think of a company that is 'Retro' or 'Heritage'. Sure the 911 has massive history behind it, but to me as a casual observer the company are more about pushing the model forward through continual evolution rather than trading on some whimsical 'glory days'.
So to be honest I wasn't at all surprised when the 44mm Carrera Heuer 02 'Porsche' Special Edition was unveiled. I recall at the time that the Calibre 11 forum said some fairly unfavourable things about it, but I thought it was okay. Not terribly 'exciting' perhaps, but nowhere close to as bad as some people were making out.
My issue with it (if I had one at all) was that it was a bit too subtle perhaps, with a barely noticeable 'Porsche' logo etched in red onto the bezel where you would normally expect to see the word 'Tachymetre' etched in red... so perhaps it's not surprising it doesn't 'jump out' at you.
But then Porsche isn't really a company that 'jumps out' at you is it? Sure they have some green GT3 911s, but Porsche isn't Ferrari or (Heaven forbid) Lamborghini. So it's more subdued and actually when you get to see this watch in real life (rather than on Instagram etc) it's actually rather nice.
It all hangs together nicely and I deliberately chose to look over the model with the strap rather than the bracelet because I'd already seen that on other models and I was interested to see this 'unique to this watch' piece of leather with it's elaborate stitching. Again I thought it looked great and much better than I'd actually expected.
The dial also looks better in person, with it's textured 'asphalt' finish. It's far more noticeable on this than say on my orange Formula 1, but I think it's a far coarser grain to be fair, and again I don't really know why some people took against it other than it was suddenly cropping up on several watches one after another.
A cool feature is the Arabic hour markers which are lumed just like on my titanium Carrera Calibre 16, I just wish that there wasn't gaps at the 15, 30 and 45 positions, then again at least they didn't chop off the 30, that would have been really awful. Again like with all these 44mm Carreras this wore very nicely and not at all like you'd expect a 44mm watch to due to the short lugs.
This one is £4850 on the strap and £5000 on the bracelet, which seems about right respective to the rest of the range. Normally it's accepted that it's better to buy the watch on a bracelet and order the strap separately but to be honest I think it looks so much better on the strap I think I'd order it on the strap and order a spare strap for later...
LINK TO THE CBN2A1F.FC6492 ON THE TAG HEUER WEBSITE:
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