SECOND LAP: Paging fans of fast cars and watches that keep up with them.
Tag Heuer is back with a limited edition nodding to the golden era of Japanese motorsports, reuniting with Team Ikuzawa and customization expert Bamford Watch Department three years after their first hookup.
Dropping Thursday, the 39mm Tag Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa takes its cues from the watchmaker’s Roadmaster stopwatch, which became the Japanese team’s visual calling card during the 1970s and 1980s.
With the watchmaker’s “glassbox” design as the starting point, the 150-piece collaboration features a white Clou de Paris-textured dial with printed indexes, chosen over applied markers to enhance the graphic feel.
Red accents run across the hour and minute hands, central chronograph seconds hand and a color-matched date wheel. Instead of the traditional running seconds display, the embarked TH20-10 manufacture chronograph calibre gives room for Team Ikuzawa’s signature, a detail that echoes the way vintage racing chronographs carried team or sponsor logos.
Presented on a steel bracelet, each watch also comes with two extra straps: a perforated white leather strap with red stitching, referencing racing gloves, and a red-and-white textile strap in Team Ikuzawa colors.
“People often think this collaboration is about motorsport, but for me it is really about culture,” Mai Ikuzawa said, calling the project a way to celebrate “the past while showing how heritage can continue to evolve.”
The Tag Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa
Over the years, the team founded by her father Tetsu Ikuzawa, one of Japan’s most prolific racing drivers of the 20th century, “has become a platform where racing, design and culture naturally meet,” she continued.
Born and raised steeped in Tokyo and motor racing culture, the younger Ikuzawa was educated at London’s Central Saint Martins.
Tag Heuer’s chief marketing officer George Ciz told WWD “the most meaningful collaborations are not only built around authenticity, credibility and deep storytelling” rather than just product, arguing today’s luxury clients “look for substance as much as aesthetics.”
The veteran Japanese team “represents a fascinating evolution from a legendary motorsport name into a contemporary cultural voice, while Bamford Watch Department brings an instinctive understanding of Tag Heuer’s history and an ability to reinterpret it in unexpected ways,” Ciz continued. “I believe collaborations resonate most when they tell a story that could not exist without each partner bringing something truly unique to the table.”
Available in Japan, the U.K., the U.S. excluding California, and a handful of selected locations worldwide as well as Tag Heuer’s e-commerce site, the Tag Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa retails for 10,450 euros.
