Since its high-profile relaunch last year, the Aquaracer, TAG Heuer’s luxury toolwatch, has rewritten sports watch design and performance codes, taking wearers beyond the edge as they push their limits in search of ever greater performance.
The La Chaux-de-Fonds-based Maison recently unveiled another new chapter with a clean, colorful take on the GMT function. The TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 300 GMT is the ultimate go-anywhere watch, a powerful and yet hugely versatile design created to cross time zones and dive and surf all over the world.
Besides its confident, steely form, the most immediately striking thing about the new TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 300 GMT is its stylish blue, yellow and white color palette. TAG Heuer’s designers carefully selected these, casual shades to represent the sky, the sun, the water and the crashing waves near the shore. These colors also make the watch the perfect all-day, every-day companion for surfers and divers who travel the world in search of the perfect break and the most spectacular underwater habitats. The characterful, imposing dial, still with its signature horizontal lines, is a deep midnight blue, offset by white lume-filled hands and hour markers. The rhodium-plated central sweep seconds hand has a yellow lacquer tip, and a luminous insert designed to inform divers that the watch is running during a dive.
And then there’s the two-tone bi-directional rotating bezel, which is cast in highly scratch- and fade-resistant ceramic. To determine day from night, it’s cast in two colors: half in a deep midnight blue to match the dial and represent the night-time hours of 6 in the evening till 6 in the morning; and half in brilliant white to represent the daytime hours of 6 in the morning till 6 in the evening. For absolute clarity and legibility, the 24-hour GMT scale is engraved into the ceramic and then filled with contrasting colors: black for day time and white for night. In pursuit of the highest quality and legibility, no detail has been overlooked. For example, the numerals 18 and 6 break across the point where the blue and white ceramic meet, and yet the color inversion continues seamlessly across the two numerals.
The GMT hand, which makes a full tour of the dial once every 24 hours and is set via the crown, is finished in yellow lacquer and tipped with luminous material. The result is a highly legible GMT wristwatch conceived and designed for the urban adventurer who in pursuing a life in the waves always goes beyond the edge. Beyond these fresh, peppy details and the addition of a second time zone, the TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 300 GMT carries the same form and functionality of the critically acclaimed automatic introduced last year. Still in place is the instantly recognizable 12-sided bezel that ties the TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional family to previous generations. And as before, every other facet has a fluted edge so that the wearer can grip and adjust the bezel with ease and confidence. The crown is still screwed and protected, and the 43-mm case continues to offer 300 meters of water resistance
Followers of the TAG Heuer Aquaracer story will recognize how these details conform to the six signature features introduced in the 1980s and perpetuated in the original TAG Heuer Aquaracer model blueprint of 2004: a uni-directional rotating bezel; a screw-down crown; water resistance to at least 200 meters; luminous markings; a sapphire crystal; and a double safety clasp. Divers, surfers and adventurers have come to rely on these real-world functions.
As with the coreTAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 300, the case back of the new watch is cast in steel and decorated with a repeating hexagon motif and the famous scaphander diving suit that also first appeared on the TAG Heuer Aquaracer case in 2004. Another symbol of the exacting attention to detail applied to the new TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional family of watches is that they have been engineered so the case back sits square, meaning the scaphander is always upright.
The new TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 300 GMT comes on either a stainless steel metal bracelet or on a deep midnight blue rubber strap to match the dial and bezel. Both feature TAG Heuer’s ergonomic fine adjustment system so that the watch can easily be tailored to fit over a wetsuit and back again, or simply to accommodate comfort changes as temperatures rise or fall. The watch’s designers have endeavored to follow in Jack Heuer’s footsteps to ensure optimal legibility for this maritime timepiece.
With all those aesthetic details, each chosen to maximise the watch’s performance, the new TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 300 GMT needed an ultra-reliable movement, too. Inside the watch therefore is TAG Heuer‘s Calibre 7, a Swiss Made automatic with a power reserve of up to 50 hours. It also provides the watch with its date function, centred at 6 o’clock and indicated under a ‘Cyclops’ magnifier.
The introduction of the TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 300 GMT signals the next phase in the evolution of the new TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional family, which also includes the TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 200 collection. It picks up on the TAG Heuer Aquaracer’s six signature features and marries the demands of utility and luxury in perfect unison.
