MAGAZINE ARTICLE: Right Heuer, Right Now by David Chalmers

 

Vintage Carreras and Monacos may hog the limelight, but to true afficionados of Heuer's motoring chronographs, the Autavia is hot property.

There's one question that divides music lovers into two related, but utterly separate camps: "Lennon or McCartney?" The infectious melodies of Paul versus the political lyrics and blues edge of John. When 550 musicians were recently asked this question in a survey, the results were surprising. Not because Paul thumped John, or vice versa, but because the answer, frequently, was Harrison. Long live the contrarians.

In the world of vintage Heuers, the equivalent question is "Carrera or Monaco?" The legend of these two chronographs is writ large, in no small part because of their revival in the late 1990s as faithful re-editions. The spirits of both iconic designs cast long shadows, which stretch from the past, arch over today and extend into the future. Both models form a core part of the TAG Heuer range today just as they did 45 years ago. The Carrera, launched in 1963, is the smaller and more classic of the two, with its clear circular dial in contrast to the '70s bright blue of the outrageous square Monaco.

When posed the Carrera or Monaco question, the answer for many Heuer collectors, and not just the contrarians, is "Autavia". Because while the Carrera and Monaco are today synonymous with motor racing, it's the Autavia that was, according to historical fact at least, the real deal, with the first Autavia used to time car races. It's the Autavia that came first and it's the Autavia that outlived its famous siblings, remaining in the catalogue right up to the bitter end of Heuer in 1985. The Autavia was the heart and soul of the Heuer range for more than 30 years, and yet today is almost forgotten by all but the loyal Heuer devotees.

MAGAZINE FEATURE: Interview with Jack Heuer from QP Magazine 2010

 

FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH...

Jack Heuer tells QP of his surprise that the brand founded by his great-grandfather is still thriving in 2010.

"To be quite honest with you, I never thought I would see this moment - not because I wouldn't be here, but because I didn't think the brand would survive this long." 

So says Jack Heuer of this year's 150th anniversary of the watch firm founded by his great grandfather, Edouard Heuer, that established its credentials as one of the world's leading producers of sports-orientated timekeepers back in 1916 when it created the astonishing Micrograph stop watch that could record elapsed times down to an accuracy of 100th of a second.

MAGAZINE FEATURE: The Latest TAG Line - 150th Anniversary Feature in QP Magazine

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Early in 2010, the decidedly 21st-century McLaren Technology Centre proved the perfect venue for TAG Heuer's launch of its 150th anniversary celebrations. QP was there to hear the speeches, toast the future, witness the rebirth of a classic watch - and see Lewis Hamilton being sent home for an early night...

Yes I'm as cynical as the next hack. But that didn't stop a lump arriving in my throat when out of the black of a rain-soaked Surrey night a 1986 McLaren Formula One car - spectacularly illuminated by pink fibre optics - came snaking along the approach road to the front door of the MCT. It didn't take long to work out that the driver was Lewis Hamilton and suspicions were confirmed when he pulled off his logo-bedecked crash helmet to reveal an expression of pure delight at having experienced an albeit short drive in the actual car that helped Alain Prost win the F1 World Championship for the second time.

Hamilton is paid to talk at events such as this - but for a few seconds he seemed genuinely lost for words, marveling at how different Grand Prix racing must have been before electronics played a pivotal role in motorsport. He is also likely to have been reflecting on the fact that he was not even one year old when Prost last drove the car in anger.

MAGAZINE FEATURE: TAG Heuer's Monaco 69 and Microtimer Concept Watches by Theodore Diehl

 

When the first quartz-controlled wristwatches appeared on the market many years ago they were exceptionally expensive, often costing much more than a regular mechanical Swiss watch. After a short time the prices dropped as the technology matured. After the initial shock passed, the industry was quite pleased with the quartz development since the vast number of quartz-based calibres that were being offered made it child's play for designers to create a boundless series of shapes and forms to fit every taste. Quartz wristwatches, or at least those without specialised functions, became low-priced fashion items, and many people bought several of them in various shapes and colours to match their favourite clothes or even their mood. The rest is history.

After the revival of the mechanical watch industry, the separation of the quartz and mechanical worlds was fairly strictly adhered to. Major houses did offer quartz watches for the few customers who requested them, but almost under a cloak of secrecy. Quartz wristwatches were often not even mentioned in catalogues for fear of diluting mechanical watch brands' PR image. Not any longer, however it is a more or less public knowledge that companies such as Rolex (working together with the Swatch group) and even firms such as Patek Philippe are spending large sums on the future development of of electronic wristwatches or hybrid mechanical/electronic calibres (these products might not even be released during our lifetimes, but, for established brands, looking 50 years ahead with R&D is not uncommon).

MAGAZINE FEATURE: TAG Heuer - Reinventing the Wheel by James Gurney

 

Reinventing the Wheel

Of all the strange and wonderful developments watchmaking has thrown up over the past few years, TAG Heuer's V4 is undoubtedly one of the most radical. The industry has seen almost everything from novel materials being used in the manufacture of hairsprings and escape wheels to the basic architecture being exploded and re-assembled, but everyone has always left untouched the basic idea of power being transmitted through toothed wheels. Everyone, that is, except TAG Heuer.

Although watchmakers have always had to be wary of the way gear wheels mesh and recognise the need to balance precision against the freedom required to stop gears locking up, better answers have been sought in the wheels themselves and, for example, the profile of the gear teeth. Even when TAG Heuer began looking for a project that would cement and support their growing reputation for more 'horologically legitimate' watches, there was no plan to rethink this fundamental of watchmaking. As Stephane Linder, product director at TAG Heuer said 'We wanted to get back our reputation for innovation'.

FEATURE: QP Magazine Bites the Dust

The postman deposited a rather large letter on my doormat this morning, which contained an unsolicited copy of 'Esquire'. I was more than a little confused as to why I had been sent this as I've never read Esquire and I certainly hadn't subscribed to it. Then I jumped to the conclusion that my Lloyds Club Account benefit had gone wrong and rather than my wife receiving Cosmopolitan for a year I was now going to get Esquire instead...

Then my wife pointed out there was also a letter for me from Hearst magazines and on opening it I discovered that it was a letter from QP telling me that the publishers had decided that it was not possible to carry on producing the magazine, even though it seems like it's been barely a year since they bought it from 'The Telegraph' group.

Admittedly QP was far from perfect, although since the takeover the spellchecking has improved dramatically. It used to be a game of mine to spot all the mistakes in the magazine, including sentences that tailed off at the end of a page only for the next paragraph to start on the next... or sometimes continue in a different, random column.

This 'attention to detail' carried over into the manufacture of their binders, of which I have five (sadly not quite enough to hold all my copies of QP, or enough to completely fill up the space under my television), one of which is a completely different shade of brown to the other four. And last time I tried to order a sixth they had stopped bothering altogether... oh and the new binder was very slightly smaller than the old ones so the older magazines wouldn't fit in it either! :(

I guess the writing was on the wall when the magazine went from bi-monthly to quarterly a while back... but at least they didn't try to take the magazine wholly 'online'. I really don't get the concept of glossy magazine's trying to be 'online', looking at photographs of watches on a screen just isn't the same as having them large scale right in front of you, and if there's one thing we don't need it's another online 'watch' magazine! Well, I guess that is probably a big part of the problem for QP isn't it? There's too much 'free' content online and the publishing lag is so great that they are reporting on the Baselworld releases in late Summer... it just won't do in a world where yesterday's watch release is old news.

Truthfully, even though it was clear that QP was becoming redundant, I persisted with it because I enjoyed receiving a nice glossy watch magazine that I can keep and read again. I've read many copies of QP more than once, and I'm sure I shall do so again. It's also nice to rediscover articles about TAG Heuer such as the ones above and below; you may for instance remember that I was reading about the 150th Anniversary of the brand the other day when the news of the 160th Anniversary Carrera broke...

While QP definitely had it's faults it was at least readable... I'm afraid the same cannot be said for 'Watch Time' which I foolishly bought at Euston Station sometime last year, or maybe even the year before. O.M.G! Everything that is wrong with modern journalism... well I say journalism, there is no journalism in Watch Time, it is simply a simpering mouthpiece for the watch brands with press releases seemingly transcribed word for word with no opinions given and no journalistic input at all required in fact!

I never actually got through that magazine, it was so boring I just gave up. Every 'article' was simply the kind of point scoring garbage that brands love - with particular fetishistic emphasis given to the number of patents applied for when making a particular watch; all in all it was like a tedious game of Horological Top Trumps. I don't know if there are any other watch magazines available in the UK, but if 'Watch Time' is indeed the only option, then I will just have to do without!

So, to return to my original confusion, why had they sent me a copy of Esquire completely out of the blue? Well, that magazine is owned by the same publishers and they were offering me a chance to switch my subscription to Esquire instead. Well, okay I thought I would have a look - so I opened the magazine up on a full page photo of a collection of cheese graters (I'm not even making this up), because you know it's very important to have the right cheese grater if you want to impress your friends and acquaintances... the horror of inviting someone over for grated cheese and then pulling out your bog-standard cheese grater, I mean how would you ever live that down? 

Flicking through the magazine I quickly realised that Esquire is a magazine for people who think it is acceptable to wear a suit and shoes without socks, although to be fair I did read an article earlier today which was quite interesting... so I have to give it that. But whether I would be interested enough to read it every two months, I'm really not so sure.

Ah well, so that's the end of QP. I shall miss my (invariably erratic) copy of QP magazine - a quarterly magazine that wasn't printed every three months as one might imagine, but rather two months sometimes and four months at others. It was always good to check out what was new and hot in the watch world five months ago and always intriguing to be made aware of what I could have seen had I visited the QP Watch Show a couple of weeks after it had taken place - yep, they couldn't even coordinate the magazine coming out with the advertising for their own watch show. 

And I'm afraid that about sums it up really, QP's demise is certainly sad but it was also completely predictable.

OWNED: QP Magazine

I've been reading QP (quantième perpétuelle) for a few years now and as is the way with these things, it didn't take me long to start 'collecting' them and buying the binders and (naturally) trying to pick up back issues from eBay. There's a lot to go at considering we're on issue #84 right now, but to me the really early ones are not so good. I had (I think) #7 which I read and then sold back on eBay, because it simply wasn't the same magazine to me. It was rather more 'technical' in the early days and more focused on articles about pinion wheels and the like, which is fine, but I really buy QP to drool over beautiful photographs of Roger Dubuis double tourbillons and other watches that I'll never own, and frankly the magazine has definitely come round to my way of thinking as it's now 95% watch porn.

I had collected all the magazines back to issue #60, and then a few prior to that, so I was rather happy to find someone selling pretty much every issue back to the early ones on eBay for £3.99 each (usual going rate seems to be about £6-8.00, and to be fair it costs about £3.00 to post one of these) and quickly bought an issue with the TAG Heuer Mikrograph on the cover and issue #4 (pictured above) only because it had the Monaco Sixty Nine on the cover, and I couldn't pass that up.

I also bought issue #40 because it had a rather lovely looking AP Royal Oak Offshore on the cover, and as it happens it also has an article about the TAG Heuer Monaco V4 in it, so that was a right result!

Having bought and paid for these three, the seller than contacted me and asked if I would be interested in buying more issues on a 'bulk' basis, so I decided to buy all the ones I was missing back to issue #40 and he offered me a very reasonable £30 for eleven issues. They arrived promptly and well packaged and I am very happy indeed with my purchase, although truth be told I have barely had a chance to look at them yet, but they are in excellent condition and that's the main thing (and honestly if I did decide to sell them on I would easily turn a profit, so I can't really lose here).

Q.P. is owned by The Telegraph group, and I really like it, but damn it is a frustrating magazine at times. For a start, it never seems to come out when it's supposed to, I remember picking issue #83 up at WH Smiths in mid September (my subscription had lapsed and they didn't contact me to ask me to renew it - I mean, what the hell, magazines usually prompt you months before your subs run out) so I made a note to look for it in mid-December. No luck... I tried several times and then emailed QP themselves to ask when the magazine would be in the shops and the email that came back beggared belief.

"Which issue are you looking for?"

As you can imagine, it took all of my resolve not to email back an extremely sarcastic reply ('Summer 2019 please...') and calmly stated 'Issue #84', to which I got this answer...

"It should be in the shops now, but if not it should be within a couple of weeks."

Excellent. I don't know what I would have done without you.

So I'm now reading issue #84, which I eventually got in very early January. One of the articles in the magazine is previewing a vintage watch auction due to take place at the end of November. Another, much larger part of the magazine is given over to promoting QP's own watch show in London in early December (Salon QP). The magazine was never going to come out before either of these events so what the hell is the point of that?

Let me just repeat that, they are promoting their own yearly London show, in a magazine that they know will come out after the show has finished. You couldn't make this up.

Also (I'm sorry to go on, but as much as I love this magazine it infuriates me... because if I was as shoddy as this in my job I would rightfully expect to be on my way!) the magazine is littered with mistakes, admittedly this month seems better than it has of late, but still there are mistakes. One of the most common mistakes they make is when the journalist has seemingly corrected a sentence but not done it properly and left both the original and the new word in the same sentence. For example, if you were to change "I sold my car" to "I sold our car" you would end up with "I sold my our car". And this happens a lot. I don't know who proof reads this magazine, but they are utter clownshoes.

The other mistake they tend to make is sentences just ending, and by that I mean they get to the bottom of the page and then when you start the next column it's a new sentence, who knows where the last part of the previous sentence went? Also, they do the same thing in the text under the heading, you know... the text that's MUCH BIGGER than the rest of the page, but not quite as big as the headline.

For example, in the current issue on page 30 there is an article about a new Bremont which celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Royal Air Force with a trilogy of complicated limited

I presume the last word in that sentence was supposed to be 'editions'.

And honestly this is not me being picky and pointing out a rare mistake, this is just normal for QP unfortunately, which considering it's a magazine about a high-end product seems incredible to me. 

But still, I buy it, even though it really doesn't cover TAG Heuer very much at all, indeed even the recent issue with the Autavia on the cover was a bit of a disappointment as rather than an in depth look at the highly lauded new timepiece, it was merely part of an article focusing on a selection of watches that are inspired by auto racing. Hmm...

Well, I don't know about you, but I feel better having got all that of my chest!

Needless to say, issue #85 will be in the shops when it damned well feels like it and will no doubt feature a preview of both SIHH and Baselworld... which by then, of course, will be a distant memory. Still, since I've renewed my subscription, at least I won't be trolling around WH Smiths every day trying to find it!