Lisa » TAG Heuer Monaco Carbon

The Only Watch charity auction provides a great opportunity for watch companies to not only support a highly-worth charitable organisation, but also to flex their creative horological industry skills in creating unique one-off watches for the auction. 2021 is the ninth edition of Only Watch, and the fourth in which TAG Heuer carrera has took part in. Befitting the bespoke nature of Just Watch timepieces, TAG Heuer gran carrera has developed something special- the hand-finished 2021 TAG Heuer Only Watch Carbon Frate.
The latest as well as Monaco may use the latest within watchmaking materials and technology, but it’s a design that owes a lot to the mythical all-black with orange highlights Heuer Fratello 74033N (we’ll avoid the ugly nickname), a watch that was developed but never sold by Heuer during the 1970s. There aren’t many vintage Padre 74033Ns which escaped from the lab and onto the actual wrists of collectors, but the Only View Monaco will be ever rarer, with just a single watch produced.
Simply Watch began in july 2004 as a biennial watch public sale to support research into Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Across the eight previous updates, more than €70 million has been raised, with some incredible wrist watches produced. Including the 2021 version, TAG Heuer carrera produced designer watches for the 2009, 2011. 2017 and 2021 auctions. Let me now look back at the three previous watches before we dive into the latest offering.
The Monaco V4 was initially released as a limited edition associated with 150 Platinum eagle watches following five years developing the particular innovative belt-driven movement. TAG Heuer offered #001/ 150 to the auction- but other than the special LE number, the watch was the same as the other 149 Us platinum V4s.
Two years later, LABEL Heuer was back with this amazing distinctive Monaco, equipped with the under one building 1/ a centesimal second Mikrograph movement. There was no expense spared inside developing this watch and it was the just time that the Mikrograph movement appeared in a Monaco and also the only time that this call and case have been used.
The actual 2017 release is the simply non-Monaco Merely Watch from TAG Heuer gran carrera and came at the height of the company’s focus on typically the modular Connected Modular 45 series, offering not only a smart watch, but also a Heuer-02 Tourbillon element. In addition the watch itself, the buyer also received a unique watch box and a lunch for four with Jean-Claude Biver, then CEO regarding TAG Heuer. The watch as well as extras sold for CHF 38, 000.
And now to the latest in the family- often the carbon Monte carlo. While this is not the first h2o and Monaco, it does use a different 39mm case to the susceptible to Bamford Monaco, the most notable difference being the exact caseback, which is redesigned to accommodate a much larger sapphire caseback.
he view is MARKING Heuer’s most recent flirtation along with almost producing a modern 74033N Monaco. When TAG Heuer carrera announced that it would make five limited features to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Monaco, you would have got short odds that one of the 5 would have been a honor to the 74033N, but INDICATE Heuer- correctly- resisted the very temptation. We possess have had the main French Limited Edition Calibre 11 as well as the ACM Full Black Monte-carlo, but neither was a true re-edition- the new Tag Heuer gran carrera Carbon Frate is about as close as we have come.

The particular influence from the 74033N are visible the all-black case, two prominent registers housing orange hands, the central fruit chronograph hand and the use of aged rectangular lume pieces, with a double-strip at 12 o’clock. Orange also happens to be the colour scheme of the 2021 auction.

But you may be asking yourself what makes this face different may be the use of any skeletonised carbon fibre dial, in what we think is a more successful execution than that will seen on the Carrera Heuer 01 and also 02 watch dial models. Typically the dial is made by dial specialist ArteCad (owned through TAG Heuer) and is milled from a single piece of graphite with key surfaces hand-finished with bevelled edges- some sort of finishing technique known as anglage.
Turn this timepiece over and you are getting to see that as much effort has gone into the back in the watch as the front. Often the caseback is large…very large, with only a thin frame of carbon fibre framing the actual movement, maintained place simply by four screws.

And what you can see behind this particular widescreen caseback is a hands finished version of the Heuer carrera 02 motion, that not only benefits pleasantly, but also through the inclusion on the carbon hairspring that was created for the Carrera Nanograph back in 2019. Why carbon? It comes down to the particular push for improved time-keeping, with carbon offering improved anti-magnetism, shock resistance along with stability across temperature ranges relative to a standard alloy hairspring.

The movements also features a unique oscillating weight in the form of the Replica TAG Heuer gran carrera Watch shield, with a thin decorative strip of colour that graduates from yellow through to a new deep lemon red painted by hand. The exact bridges in addition to plates with the Heuer 02 are also decorated with ten different palm finishing techniques, as POINT Heuer explains:
The final touch is a new leather strap developed by DRAW Heuer in which looks like a traditional metal bracelet. The link effect is produced by injecting silicon is injected into the sole of the leather, that is then
heat-stamped with a form in the style of a metal link band.