If you clicked on the story hoping for some awesome shots of my hot lap in a Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS, I’m sorry to tell you they don’t exist. But now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk about the new cheap UK replica TAG Heuer Carrera Chronosprint x Porsche watches. It’s a weird but very interesting watch made to celebrate 60 years of both the Porsche 911 and the Heuer Carrera. And if that isn’t enough to keep you around, there are some more bits of info (and a brand-new car announcement) for you Porsche lovers.
I was lucky enough to be at Rennsport Reunion 7 – a massive gathering of Porsche collectors and fans held once every three-to-five years – when I got a call for a “hot lap.” Some other folks got to take their laps in the new and coveted 911 GT3 RS; I was just fine to settle into the passenger seat of the GT4 next to the pilot, Timo Bernhard, a former Porsche factory driver. I joked with him that since Romain Dumas (who was piloting another car in our hot lap group) had to put up with me for four days at the Mille Miglia earlier this year, I didn’t want him to have to suffer through two more laps. Bernhard must have drawn the short straw, I said. It was only a bit later that I realized that by riding with Bernhard, I’d ridden with two-thirds of the 2010 Le Mans-winning Audi Sport North America team. He laughed and then punched the gas. My phone barely stayed in my hands, and most of the videos I took were rough, to say the least.
So let’s stick with what I know: high quality fake watches. I’m a pretty newly minted “car guy,” but there are more than a few similarities between deep car and watch nerdery. Knowing all the specs or mechanics of every car (or watch) or getting under the hood is beyond my reach. There are also all the numbers and references, which can be important in understanding lineage, history, and lore but are often confusing, especially to a newbie. One thing I do know is that when the original Porsche 911 first hit the track, it did 0-100km/h in 9.1 seconds.
The GT4 is a bit quicker off the jump – 3.9 seconds total – a pretty hard gut punch of acceleration even in its luxurious and cradling bucket seats. But TAG Heuer drew inspiration from that original 9.1 seconds for their new “Carrera Chronosprint x Porsche.” Press the chronograph pusher at the top right, and you get a sudden burst of acceleration from the chronograph hand as it races a third of the way around the dial in 9.1 seconds. Acceleration in a car isn’t linear. In the same way, the chronograph hand on the Chronosprint progressively slows to a crawl after that first burst. As it inches toward 55 elapsed seconds, it even looks like it might stop completely before it gets to 60 seconds and speeds up all over again.
While the new 39mm luxury replica TAG Heuer “Glassbox” Carrera watches have dominated this year’s market for TAG Heuer fans – that includes the updated Skipper – the new Chronosprint goes bigger. It measures 42mm by 14.9mm, including the big curved crystal that gives it the “Glassbox” nickname and allows you to read the indices around the flange at nearly any angle at a quick glance. That may be more useful on Swiss movements copy watches with tachymeters, but here, there’s an adjusted elapsed time scale adjusted for the strange acceleration effect of the chronograph. The larger size does seem to help with the legibility of that domed flange. So, despite generally liking a more vintage sizing, I’d say there’s a potential argument for 42mm here.
Regardless, the top replica watches didn’t feel too big on my wrist. Part of “feel” is often visual bias, and the watch didn’t look that big to me and a few other people I let try it on at Rennsport. That might be helped by the fact that the new generation of crystals is more distortion-free. The stark silver dial on the steel model also helps with legibility. The pops of color from the subdial hands and markers meant to evoke a redline on a tachometer draw your eye just enough to keep the design interesting to keep looking at. The main unfortunate point is the inclusion of a date window at 6:00 on the dial. Not only does it break up the cleanness of the dial, but by including a date, the lower subdial can’t be sunken like those at 3:00 and 9:00.
The movement is really the interesting part here. The automatic caliber TH20-08 has hours, minutes, seconds, and yes, the date. But how did AAA TAG Heuer fake watches make the chronograph run in such a strange way? My gut reaction was a snail cam. If the chronograph is functioning strangely by design, it’s almost always a snail cam. And sure enough, there are actually two snail-shaped wheels, creating the decelerating motion for the central hand.
I wasn’t quite sure about that design at first – almost purely because of the novelty of the movement and the cost for that novelty – $9,200 in stainless steel. It’s not exactly a useful timing device, but that’s not exactly the point. Leave it to a conversation with Patrick Dempsey to help me understand the 2023 wholesale replica TAG Heuer Chronosprint watches – or at least the idea behind it. Yes, that Patrick Dempsey. You know, the famous race car driver and racing team owner who is both a TAG Heuer and a Porsche ambassador? Oh, I guess he’s been in some TV shows and movies, too, so he’s also a storyteller. And that was the key to understanding this watch.
“This is a storytelling watch,” Dempsey told me. “With both TAG Heuer and Porsche, so much is about the story. When you buy into the story, and you buy into that world, you want to be immersed in it. In that way, I think this is a very important watch for TAG Heuer. Not only because of the connection to Porsche but because of what it represents in creating a new movement.”
“The fact that they not only made it as a storytelling device but brought it to market, its innovative, but yet it hasn’t lost its heritage. And that’s very much like Porsche and the new 911.”
Neither a car like the 911 nor a mechanical watch is a practical thing, but that’s not why most people are into either. It’s about feeling, emotion, mechanics, and yes, the story. There were a lot of cars at Rennsport that had fascinating stories, like the prototype 911 shown above, so it’s easy to imagine how Porsche fans could get caught up in a storytelling watch. But there were also new cars announced with interesting stories behind them.
In fact, the other reason Dempsey was at Rennsport was for another partnership between TAG Heuer super clone watches for sale and Porsche. For years, he’s been a brand ambassador for both brands – slightly longer with TAG Heuer. He competed in the 2015 motorsport season at the wheel of a 911 RSR in the Sports Car World Endurance Championship – including the world-famous Le Mans 24-hour race. While Dempsey has wound down his participation in endurance racing because of the time commitment but is continuing to find ways he can compete. Mille Miglia is on his bucket list, as is Bathurst 1000 – though he’s afraid he might be a little “long in the tooth.” But in the middle of October, Dempsey will be settling into a special Sonderwunsch project car based on the 718 Cayman GT4 RS and driving the first two legs of this year’s Carrera Panamericana.
For the uninitiated, Sonderwunsch is Porsche’s one-off custom car and total refurbishment service. As if their other customization projects aren’t exclusive enough, Sonderwunsch opens things up to a whole different level. This collaborative effort between TAG Heuer and Porsche bears the number 154 (a second car, number 152, will be shown at the race and auctioned off for charity) and has a painted livery that harkens back to the Porsche 550 Coupé that took part in the Carrera Panamericana 70 years ago. No changes have been made to the powertrain, so the car has a 4.0-liter flat-6 borrowed from the engine in the previous-generation 911 GT3. That means there’s a max 493 hp with rear-wheel drive from a 7-speed dual-clutch automatic. Of course, there’s acustom interior and other 1:1 TAG Heuer replica watches touches around. The entire car is painted in Le Mans Silver Metallic.
The car also features a new dashboard timer inspired by the original Heuer Rally Master (among other TAG Heuer touches) with identical refurbished movements. Just like on the old Rally Masters, there is a “Master-Time,” a clock with an eight-day power reserve made possible by a double barrel movement from Revue Thommen, the Calibre 63. The other display features the Monte Carlo chronograph, with the center recording seconds and minutes with a jump hour recorder powered by an A. Schild caliber 1666, with the jumper hour complications created by Dupois-Depraz.
I frequently passed the Carrera Chronosprint around at Rennsport Reunion 7, and I think most people shared my first reaction to the watch. Especially among automotive enthusiasts, what’s the point of a chronograph if there’s no tachymeter bezel? A number of people thought the best quality fake watches was broken – I did too at one point. But I often left the chronograph running over the weekend, encouraging people to wait a little bit and watch the movement in action. I don’t think it once failed to get a “wow.” Turns out car people can get behind a good story, no matter if it’s in car or watch form.