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Thursday, 30 December 2021

BUYING EXPERIENCE: TAG Heuer Formula 1 Quartz Watches

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Those of you who frequent the Calibre 11 Forum and my Instagram account (tag.heuer.enthusiast) may recall seeing a photo or two of these classic Formula 1s months ago... I actually bought the ladies one in February and ended up giving it to my wife in October (for our Wedding Anniversary) and the larger one for myself in May and then hid it in a drawer until after our wedding anniversary so that I could give it to her so that she could give it to me for Christmas. See, if I gave it to her before she'd had hers she might well have gone on a mission trying to find a ladies one... and I definitely didn't want that to happen!


Anyway, thankfully everything worked out in the end and we have yet another matching pair of classic 80s TAG Heuer divers. I forget now how many we have that match, I can think of five off the top of my head, but there may be one or two more. 

Well I say 'match' but actually these two don't quite match. As you've probably noticed by now they aren't quite the same colours; the bezels and straps are matching obviously, but the dials and cases are quite different.


The ladies one came from an eBay seller called 'TT-Tony' and cost £265. I have bought from him previously; my silver 6000 Chrono came from him and he fixed it when it arrived with a fault so I felt pretty confident purchasing from him again. The larger one came from another eBay seller and cost £230, which I thought was a very good price considering the condition and the fact that these are hard to come by and very sought after. Both of these also came in the original 80s barrel boxes, the ladies one also came with the outer card box.


The men's F1 arrived wearing a (genuine) TAG Heuer strap, unfortunately it was black rather than the correct 'baby blue' that it would have originally been supplied on. I can understand why people switch these straps out for black because the light ones do get grubby over time and they absorb colour from clothes too... but it just doesn't look anything like as cool so obviously that had to be rectified before it went in the drawer (adding another £32 to the overall purchase price).


It's funny, I didn't realise quite how much I liked this one until I opened it on Christmas Day. This is definitely one of my favourite classic F1s now, in fact I would say it's top three for sure, along with the yellow/black and the..... yellow/grey maybe, or possibly the full red. Tough to call. 

This brings my classic F1 collection up to fourteen pieces and as I am writing this I am actually waiting for a fifteenth piece to arrive. I'm slowly getting all the pieces into place, maybe next year I will complete the set. I think I need about four more, but naturally getting those at the 'right price' will be challenging I'm sure!

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