Tag Heuer Carrera Chronograph
The phrase ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ springs to mind when it comes to the nicknames the watch community applies to iconic timepieces. One would think the marketing bods at Rolex would shy away from anything that conflicts with the house’s messaging, such as ‘the Pepsi’ (the GMT-Master with red and blue bezels) or ‘the Hulk’ (the Submariner in green), and one doubts that Patek are overly enamoured of ‘Disco Volante’ — Italian for ‘flying saucer’ — as an appellation for certain Calatravas.
And yet: so affectionately are they meant, and such is the contribution these monikers make to horological folklore, the major of manufactures tend to embrace them. This has certainly been the case since, in the late 1960s, a new version of the TAG Heuer Carrera — a model introduced a few years previously and named by its creator, Jack Heuer, after the legendary Carrera Panamericana race — was nicknamed ‘the Panda’ for its silvered dial with black subdials at three and
