TAG Heuer has built a chronograph for a Japanese racing team. The Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa is a 39 mm steel piece limited to 150 individually numbered examples, finished in the red and white colours worn by a Tokyo motorsport outfit founded in 1981 and dressed in the graphic language of a 1960s stopwatch.
Three names sit behind it. The Swiss watchmaker brought the Carrera Glassbox and the calibre TH20-10, George Bamford brought the customisation eye that built Bamford Watch Department, and Mai Ikuzawa brought the identity of the team she runs as Team Principal and Creative Director. Their first project together landed in 2023, and this one arrives with rather more archive material behind it.
The reference point is the Heuer Roadmaster stopwatch, a dashboard instrument from a period when timing a lap meant a thumb and a good eye. Its proportions, colour accents and printed scales have been rebuilt around a wrist.
Reading the Roadmaster
The Roadmaster was designed to be read at speed, and that shaped everything about it. Bold printed graphics, generous scales and no decorative interference, all in service of a driver glancing down for a fraction of a second. Its graphic codes were studied closely by both collaborators before anything was drawn.
Printed indexes replace applied markers on the dial, a decision that keeps the surface flat and graphic. The black flange, carrying a 60 second and minute scale with printed triangle indexes, handles the rest.
Dressed in team colours
White clou de Paris texture covers the dial, catching light across a fine hobnail grid that stops the expanse of white from looking blank. Two counters break it up, with a red printed minute chronograph register at three o’clock running a rhodium-plated polished hand, and a white printed hour register at nine o’clock with a red lacquered hand. Black printed numeral indexes and a red TAG Heuer logo complete the arrangement.
The facetted, rhodium-plated hour and minute hands carry it alongside white Super-LumiNova, the central chronograph hand is fully lacquered, and the angled date disc at six o’clock prints every numeral in the team’s own shade.This manufacture chronograph movement omits the running seconds display altogether, freeing the lower half of the dial.
TAG Heuer chronographs of the 1960s and 1970s frequently surrendered dial space to racing teams, sponsors and partners, a habit that followed from Jack Heuer’s decision to tie timing instruments to motorsport in the first place.
Steel and straps
Steel, fine brushed and polished, holds the 39 mm case together with no bezel at all. The domed glassbox sapphire crystal receives double anti-reflective treatment and runs uninterrupted across dial and flange, which is the entire point of the construction and a nod to Jack Heuer’s original insistence on legibility. Water resistance stands at 100 metres, the crown at three o’clock wears a red lacquered ring, and round pushers sit at two and four.
The seven-row steel bracelet arrives fitted, with alternating brushed and polished finishes and a double folding clasp carrying the applied shield. Two further straps come in the box, one a perforated white leather affair with red stitching and lining borrowed from classic racing gloves, the other a white textile strip with red stripes drawn from the team’s historic livery. Turn the watch over and the screw-down sapphire caseback carries dedicated Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department prints alongside the individual XXX/150 engraving.
Every piece is delivered in a red metal toolbox of the sort found under a workbench in any pit garage. Inside sit the watch, both additional straps, a travel pouch and a set of custom Team Ikuzawa charms intended for keys and personal accessories.