Tag Heuer Monaco – 50 Years of Racing Pleasure

There is no secret that Jack Heuer was a racing fanatic. He spent most of his life around the racing tracks being a close friend of all the famous pilots in the 1960s and 1970s. Monaco was launched as the first automatic chronograph and it was linked to motorsport by the appearance at the wrist of Hollywood star Steve McQueen in 1971, while driving a Porsche 917 in the movie “Le Mans”.
At the beginning, there was the mission of TAG Heuer to draw the world’s attention to its new automatic mechanism – Calibre 11 – the world’s first revolutionary microrotor-based chronograph. So the choice of a square case came as the perfect solution to make the new model stand out, especially that the case provider from those times managed to obtain a water-resistant square case – a premiere for the industry. To make the automatic rewinding more obvious, the designers decided to move the crown at 9 o’clock as a sign you don’t have to use it so often as in the case of manual winding watches.

The full story in MISTERWATCH No. 2 printed October edition 2019.