TAG Heuer, Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department reunite for a new Carrera chronograph, limited to 150 pieces and inspired by vintage motorsport timing instruments.
TAG Heuer doesn’t need an introduction to racing. But its latest limited edition proves the brand still has fresh ways to tell that story, this time through the eyes of one of Japan’s most storied motorsport dynasties.
The Swiss watchmaker has reunited with Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watches for the TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa, a follow-up to their well-received 2023 debut. Limited to just 150 individually numbered pieces, the watch fuses TAG Heuer’s chronograph pedigree with George Bamford’s customisation instincts and the creative direction of Mai Ikuzawa, whose family has shaped Japanese racing since 1981.
Ikuzawa is an unusual figure in watchmaking circles: a Central Saint Martins-trained designer who also happens to run a racing team. As Team Principal and Creative Director of Team Ikuzawa, she’s spent the past several years turning her family’s motorsport legacy into a genuine cultural platform, pulling in collaborators from fashion, art and luxury along the way. TAG Heuer is her latest, and arguably highest-profile, partner.
For this second chapter, Ikuzawa worked again with George Bamford, the watch customisation heavyweight known for reworking iconic designs without losing what made them iconic in the first place. Together, the pair looked to an unlikely source of inspiration: the Heuer Roadmaster stopwatch, a vintage timing instrument from TAG Heuer’s own archives, prized for its bold, no-nonsense graphics and pit-lane legibility.
That stopwatch DNA runs through the entire watch. Built on the 39mm TAG Heuer Carrera Glassbox — the brand’s bezel-free case that gives an unbroken view down to the dial and flange — the design channels Jack Heuer’s original obsession with legibility. The white dial gets a Clou de Paris texture and printed indexes rather than applied markers, leaning into that stopwatch-inspired graphic look, while Team Ikuzawa’s signature red turns up everywhere: the lacquered hour and minute hands, the central chronograph seconds hand, the date disc numerals, even the crown’s lacquered ring.
The standout detail sits at six o’clock, where the Team Ikuzawa signature takes the place of a running seconds display. That’s only possible thanks to the TH20-10 manufacture chronograph calibre, which omits the sub-dial entirely — a nod to 1960s and ’70s TAG Heuer chronographs, when brands routinely handed over dial real estate to racing teams and sponsors.
TAG Heuer hasn’t skimped on the details elsewhere either. A black flange sets off a crisp white minute track, and the watch ships on a seven-row steel bracelet with alternating brushed and polished finishes. Two extra straps come in the box: perforated white leather with red stitching styled after racing gloves, and a red-and-white textile strap lifted straight from Team Ikuzawa’s historic livery. Flip the watch over, and the caseback carries both Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department engravings alongside each piece’s individual number.
Even the packaging plays along, arriving in a case styled after a racing team’s toolbox, complete with both straps, a travel pouch and a set of Team Ikuzawa charms for keys and bags.
It’s a lot of storytelling packed into one chronograph, but that’s rather the point. Three years after their first collaboration, TAG Heuer, Bamford and Ikuzawa have built something that reads less like a co-branding exercise and more like a genuine handshake between Swiss watchmaking heritage and Japanese racing culture — one that, with only 150 pieces up for grabs, most collectors will have to admire from the sidelines.
