Before you even begin to contend with the sheer insanity of the Carrera Plasma Nanograph – the most expensive and bonkers novelty TAG Heuer unveiled at this year’s edition of Watches and Wonders – it’s probably worth asking that age-old question: “What’s in a name?” TAG Heuer’s acronymic prefix stands for Techniques Avant Garde,’ and even the briefest of Googling reveals that the company has long lived up to this descriptor. Even in the pre-merger era.
But where Heuer in the past century was known primarily for its mechanical innovations – the company pioneered the watch industry’s first self-winding chronograph in the guise of the Calibre 11 – TAG is expanding the company’s contemporary oeuvre; intriguingly, in the playing field of synthetic diamonds.
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True to its name, the Carrera Plasma Tourbillon Nanograph positively floods every inch of itself with carbon materiel. The proverbial jewels in the crown of this extreme technical exercise consist of a carbon-composite hairspring and crown machined entirely out of lab-grown diamonds. Watch writers have variously regurgitated CEO Frederic Arnault’s comments about how the Carrera Plasma “expand[s] the possible palette and designs for diamond watches and diamonds in general,” but more importantly, it signals TAG Heuer’s determination to push the boundaries of material science – something we’ve already seen several times in 2022 with innovations like the Solargraph’s luminescent DLC coating.
Synthetic diamonds are, of course, not a novel occurrence. Typically associated with the jewellery industry, they are decidedly rarer inside the context of watchmaking. Yet more interesting still is the manner in which TAG have incorporated them into this new Carrera: shards of ice are inlaid all across the 44mm case’s lateral surfaces, while each chronograph register is decorated using a polycrystalline diamond (attached to its parent surface using a brass base).
On the mechanical front, the Plasma is powered by a derivation of the robust Heuer 02 movement. The biggest distinction here is the addition of a tourbillon, though TAG fans will recognise the chronograph’s column-wheel construction and checkerboard motif (inspired by the one-off Carbon Monaco commissioned for Only Watch 2021). Here, the addition of carbon has a more practical application, as it forms the basis of the movement’s tourbillon cage: a clever bit of material engineering that optimises the mechanism’s rotation, thus making the overall movement more precise.
At an MSRP of $518,900, it’d be facetious to say the Carrera Plasma is for everybody, yet the reality is that it may very well offer a glimpse into the future of 21st century watchmaking. In an age when every Swiss brand exec under the sun seems to be scrambling to make more steel sports watches, this is experimentation in its most unadulterated form.
