Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire’s weekly column bringing you watchmaking happenings and the watch world’s most essential news since March 2020. This week marks the official start of a new watchmaking year with LVMH’s Geneva Watch Week. It’s happening online, which means we can bring you live the brand new launches, unveiled a few hours ago, of some of the luxury group’s historic Swiss brands.
Autavia is a name that was used by the legendary watch brand Tag Heuer as early as 1933, when it was designed for on-board clocks in the emerging sports of private aviation and motor racing. It wasn’t until 1962, however, that the name began to grace the dials of a new line of sports wristwatches for an entirely new generation of petrolheads.
Jack Heuer’s first new watch since he took the helm of the Heuer brand in 1958 was a hand-wound chronograph with a black dial and white sub-dials, a style known for making nerds look like an inverted panda. Technical, yet easy to read, it defined the new accessible mood of the early 60s and was quickly embraced as much as a style statement as well as a functional tool. It preceded another famous Heuer, the Carrera, by a year. For a hip indication, Mick Jagger had one of each.
This week, Heuer is releasing three new models of the Autavia in a 60th anniversary tribute to the original with some serious upgrades under the hood. Two chronographs, one with an all-black dial but with a blackened steel case, and another in steel with a steel dial and black sub-dials – effectively a panda – feature a new certified Heuer Caliber 02 chronograph movement COSC.
That would be innovation enough for many, but this move also introduces a flyback feature to the Autavia for the first time. Flyback is designed to allow a user to restart the chronograph function instantly with the push of a pusher without having to stop and restart it, allowing for example consecutive lap times to be easily recorded. Both chronographs come with black alligator straps, with the black DLC-coated version – for our money – being the most striking.
The third 60and Autavia anniversary is a great departure for the Autavia family. It features another in-house movement, the COSC-certified Heuer 07 caliber, and it’s a GMT watch, the first time this feature has appeared in the Autavia. Without the classic chronograph sub-dials, it looks markedly different from the other versions, with a simpler open dial in blue that features a second time zone indicated by an orange pointer.
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