With Grand Seiko, Minase, Kurono and Naoya Hida among my personal favourite watch brands, I think I qualify as something of a Japanophile, which is why I really like the latest collaboration watch from TAG Heuer. It’s the Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa, a follow-up to their initial collaboration in 2023 and a strong sophomore showing. If you’re unfamiliar with Team Ikuzawa, they’re a Japanese motorsport team established in the 1960s and currently headed by the founder’s daughter Mai Ikuzawa, who as of 2025 is also a Creative Director at Bentley Motors.
Under Mai’s direction, Team Ikuzawa has grown from a racing team into a fully fledged brand with its own fashion and apparel branch that brings a seriously cool fusion of retro Japanese street styling and motorsport gear. It’s that fusion of elements that makes a collaboration with TAG Heuer a natural partnership, where style and sportiness come together in wristwatch form. There is a third partner involved in this collaboration as Mai received design assistance from Bamford Watch Department.
Jumping to the watch, it uses the 39mm Carrera Glassbox as its base, produced in stainless steel with 100m water resistance. However, that’s largely where the similarities stop as the dial has been completely redesigned and even the movement is slightly different. In fact, both the dial redesign and updated movement can be traced to the same decision and that’s the fact that the Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa is a bicompax chronograph.
The majority of Carrera Chronographs are tricompax, which means they have three subdial counters – a 12-hour timer at 9 o’clock, a 30-minute timer at 3 o’clock and small seconds at 6. In order to become a bicompax display, the small seconds have been completely removed, which in turn means the movement has been swapped from the TH20-00 to the TH20-10. The logic behind this is that it allows the Team Ikuzawa logo to take pride of place at 6 o’clock instead, imitating historic partnership watches where brand or team logos are positioned beneath the central handstack.
As for colours, we see the super clean white and red of Team Ikuzawa, based on the Japanese flag. It makes for a super intense display that looks both stylish and race ready. The dial plate is finished with a Clous de Paris hobnail pattern that adds a nice level of texture to the piece. The reason the red appears so intense on the hands and date wheel is that they are lacquered.
An additional detail is that the timing scales have been updated. What used to be the peripheral tachymeter scale is now the chronograph seconds scale, graduated to 1/5th of a second. Essentially swapping out the utility of being able to calculate your speed for extra legibility on the chronograph’s core function. Let’s be honest, how often were you calculating your speed anyway? Alongside that change, the standard timekeeping scale has swapped from applied indexes to printed Arabic numerals that run from 0-60, giving the watch a speedometer-like appearance.
We briefly mentioned that the Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa houses the TH20-10 calibre and it’s visible through the exhibition caseback. The sapphire window of the caseback is dual-signed with Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department. Past that you can see the openworked rotor and Côtes de Genève finishing. Specs-wise, it rocks an 80-hour power reserve.
For pricing and availability, it’s £8,850 in a limited edition of 150 pieces. This has got to be one of my personal favourite TAG Heuer collaborations in a long time. The way it embraces both the motorsport heritage of Team Ikuzawa while also having that bold, streetwear style that the Team has cultivated under Mai’s direction is very cool. The last time I was this excited about a TAG Heuer collab was probably the 2023 Porsche Chronosprint, and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not that that watch was also red and white. Maybe it’s just a sporty colourway that really works for TAG.
Price and Specs:
More details at Tag Heuer.
