News · TAG Heuer

TAG Heuer puts the Dutch national colour on a 9.9 mm Formula 1 for Zandvoort

A 1,500-piece solar-powered Formula 1 in sand-blasted steel, 38 mm across and under 10 mm thick, good for ten months on a charge, at A$3,200.

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

• TAG Heuer has made an orange Formula 1 Solargraph limited edition timed to the Zandvoort Grand Prix, sold first through an exclusive online pre-sale.
• The 38 mm sand-blasted steel case is 9.9 mm thick and keeps its grey opalin dial calm, putting the orange on the flange, hands and indexes instead.
• Reference WBY111H.FT8128 is limited to 1,500 pieces at A$3,200, with early online access stated to open on 18 August 2026 at 5:00 pm AEST.

The plastic-bezel Formula 1 was a lot of people's first real watch

There is a particular kind of watch person, and I suspect a decent number of you are one, whose entry into all of this was a Formula 1 with a coloured fibreglass bezel bought some time around the end of the eighties, worn until the strap perished, and then remembered far more fondly than it probably deserved. TAG Heuer knows exactly who those people are. It has been mining that memory since the Solargraph arrived, and the newest one is aimed squarely at a single weekend in the Netherlands: the Formula 1 Solargraph 38 mm in orange, made for Zandvoort.

Where this differs from most special editions is that the colour is not applied decoration. Orange is the national racing colour of the Netherlands and the grandstands at Zandvoort turn into a solid wall of it, so a watch that goes this hard on the colour is describing something the buyer will actually have seen with their own eyes.

Grey opalin, and then all the orange happens at the edges

The dial is grey opalin, which is the restrained choice and the one that makes the rest of it work. Around it runs an orange-red flange, and the hands and applied indexes are lacquered red with Super-LumiNova. That combination is unusual: most brands doing a colour edition would have coloured the dial and left the details alone. Doing it the other way round means the watch reads as grey and legible from the wrist, and as unmistakably orange from a metre away.

The bezel is TAG Heuer's TH-Polylight, bidirectional, which is the modern descendant of the fibreglass rings that made these watches recognisable in the first place. It is a light material, and on a watch this size that matters, because it keeps the weight low enough that the thing never nags at the wrist over a long day.

Thirty-eight by nine point nine, which is the whole argument for it

The case is sand-blasted steel, 38 mm across and 9.9 mm thick, with 18.5 mm between the lugs. Getting under 10 mm is what a solar quartz movement buys you, and it changes the watch completely: this slides under a cuff without thought and disappears when you push your sleeves up to do something. Nobody has ever said that about a 45 mm carbon chronograph.

Water resistance is 100 metres. On a watch built around a sports weekend, in a country where it rains sideways, that is the rating that lets you stop caring, and it comes with the perforated orange rubber strap and steel pin buckle that the rest of the design is clearly built around.

Ten months of light, and the case for solar over mechanical

The movement is the Solargraph calibre TH50-00. It converts both daylight and indoor artificial light into charge, running hours, minutes, seconds and a date, and TAG Heuer quotes up to ten months of autonomy from a full charge, with a brief exposure to light good for about a day. Ten months is the figure that reframes what this watch is: not something you wind, not something you wear on rotation, but something you leave in a bag and find still running.

I have spent years being sniffy about quartz in a collection like this, and I have come round, mostly because of what solar does to the ownership experience. A mechanical watch you wear four times a year is a watch you set four times a year. This one is simply correct whenever you pick it up, which for a watch pegged to an annual race weekend is exactly the right behaviour.

Fifteen hundred pieces, and the pre-sale is the interesting bit

The limitation is 1,500 pieces, which by TAG Heuer standards is genuinely restricted rather than nominally so, and the brand is running an exclusive online pre-sale ahead of the race rather than putting them into boutiques first. That is a notable choice, because it means the people most likely to get one are those watching a web page at a specific minute rather than those with a relationship at a retailer.

Whether you think that is fairer or simply louder probably depends on which of those two you are. For a watch built around a grandstand full of orange, I lean towards it being the right call. The Dutch will forgive a lot, but they will not forgive being beaten to their own colour.

TAG Heuer Formula 1 Solargraph 38 mm Zandvoort pricing and availability

The Zandvoort edition is reference WBY111H.FT8128, limited to 1,500 pieces, and TAG Heuer's Australian site lists it at A$3,200 on the perforated orange rubber strap. Exclusive early online access is stated to begin on 18 August 2026 at 5:00 pm AEST, ahead of the wider release.