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TAG Heuer puts a Clou de Paris dial in a 39 mm Carrera for Team Ikuzawa

A 150-piece steel chronograph on the in-house TH20-10, 39 mm across and 13.9 mm thick, with red used exactly twice and an 80-hour reserve, at A$15,850.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 18 August 2026

• TAG Heuer has worked with Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department on a 39 mm steel Carrera chronograph limited to 150 individually numbered pieces.
• Its white dial carries a Clou de Paris hobnail pattern inside a black flange, with red confined to the minute counter and the central chronograph hand.
• The watch is listed on TAG Heuer's Australian site at A$15,850 on a seven-row steel bracelet, with two further straps included in the box.

I have run out of patience with collaboration chronographs, and then this turned up

My default position on a badged chronograph is that somebody has taken a perfectly good watch and charged extra for a logo, and I have held that view long enough that it has started doing my thinking for me. So it is only fair to say when a watch talks me out of it. TAG Heuer has partnered with Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department on a run of pieces honouring the Japanese racing outfit, and the one that has my attention is the smallest and most restrained of them, the 39 mm Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa.

Part of what makes it work is that the Carrera has always been a motorsport watch rather than a watch that motorsport was applied to. Jack Heuer put it into production in 1963 after the Carrera Panamericana, the Mexican road race, and the whole point of the original was a dial cleared of everything that was not information. Sixty-odd years later that is still the brief this one is working to, which is more than most collaborations can say.

A Clou de Paris dial, which is not where anyone expected this to go

The dial is white and carries a Clou de Paris pattern, the fine pyramid hobnail more usually found on a dress watch bezel or a Breguet case band. On a chronograph it does something unexpected: it breaks up the reflection across a large white surface, so the printed indices stay readable at angles where a flat white dial would just glare back at you. Framing it is a black flange carrying the 60-second scale, which is what gives the face its depth.

Red is used twice and no more. It animates the minute counter at three o'clock and it runs the length of the lacquered central chronograph hand, so the two things you are actually reading while timing something are the only two things in colour. That is a discipline a lot of chronographs abandon, and here it means a glance mid-lap lands on the right hands rather than sorting through a dial. The date sits angled at six o'clock.

Thirteen point nine millimetres, and the argument that will divide people

The case is 39 mm across and 13.9 mm thick in steel, finished with alternating fine-brushed and polished surfaces, and water resistant to 100 metres. Those two numbers will start an argument. Thirty-nine millimetres is exactly where a lot of us have been asking TAG Heuer to go, and 13.9 mm is thicker than a 39 mm watch has any right to be, so a watch that is nearly modest across the wrist still sits up off it.

I have decided I do not mind, and the reason is that an automatic chronograph with a column wheel and a vertical clutch has to put that mechanism somewhere. Ask for 39 mm and 11 mm and you are asking for a different movement, probably a modular one, and that trade is worse. Others will disagree, and they will be right about their own wrists. Turn it over and the sapphire caseback is where the argument gets settled, because you can see exactly what the height is buying.

Eighty hours from the TH20-10, and what that actually changes

The movement is TAG Heuer's in-house TH20-10, automatic, beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour, with an 80-hour power reserve. Eighty hours is the number that makes a chronograph practical rather than precious, because a chronograph is the watch you are most likely to leave sitting while you use the timer on your phone instead, and this one forgives a couple of days of that. The chronograph itself reads to a quarter of a second, with a 30-minute counter.

It arrives on a seven-row steel bracelet with a folding clasp, finished in the same brushed and polished mix as the case, and TAG Heuer includes two further straps in the box. That is the detail that tells you who this is aimed at: 150 pieces, individually numbered, going to people who will change the look of the watch depending on what they are doing that day rather than leaving it on the bracelet for a decade.

What a 150-piece run says about where TAG Heuer thinks it is

There is a version of this watch that exists only to move units on the strength of a racing name, and this is not it. The restraint is the whole argument: one pattern, one colour used twice, a size the collection has been short of. Whether 150 pieces at this price finds its people quickly will say something about how much goodwill the Carrera name still carries in Japan, and I suspect the answer is quite a lot.

TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa pricing and availability

The Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa is reference CBS221M.EB0435, limited to 150 individually numbered pieces, and TAG Heuer's Australian site lists it at A$15,850 on the steel bracelet with two additional straps included. It was showing as out of stock online at the time of writing, which for a numbered run of this size is roughly what you would expect, so a boutique enquiry is the more realistic route.