TAG Heuer Aquaracer 300

TAG Heuer goes beyond the edge with the Aquaracer Professional 300, a luxury tool watch that connects us to the seas and continues a legacy that began more than 40 years ago

The new-generation model is called the Aquaracer Professional 300. Bold and yet elegant, highly functional and yet versatile, it’s a highly robust watch with a luxury feel that goes beyond the edge and sets a new high-water mark: for ergonomic, extreme-performance mechanical watches. Designed for work and play, and to soak up nature’s harshest challenges, it’s a pure symbol of TAG Heuer’s fearless, avant-garde spirit.

With its striking, instantly recognisable aesthetic, epitomised by the Aquaracer’s signature 12 faceted bezel, and its high specifications, it’s entirely contemporary, and yet it recalls a legacy that TAG Heuer began more than 40 years ago.

That legacy began with the Heuer Ref. 844, a divers’ watch released in 1978. It had a memorable dial design with a red 24-hour scale, prominent lume-filled hour markers and a rotating divers’ bezel with a crystal-clear minutes scale for safely timing dives. It set the standard for reliable diver’s watches and was adopted by professional and recreational divers all over the world. In the four decades since the watch was launched, TAG Heuer has continued to push the limits of divers’ watch design and performance, through celebrated pieces such as the Night Diver and the 1000 and 2000 Series models, while the Ref. 844 has become a collectors’ favourite.

Frédéric Arnault, TAG Heuer CEO, said: “TAG Heuer has been making bold, high-performance, stylish, luxury tool watches for more than four decades. The Aquaracer Professional 300 picks up a much-loved story and moves it on with the most significant step we’ve taken to develop our Aquaracer collection in many years. Pushing the limits, high functionality, a bold and unmistakable aesthetic, and the promise of going with you, even to the extremes – the Aquaracer Professional 300 is a watch that will take you beyond the edge. This is, after all, the place where we truly find ourselves.”

Breaking down the Aquaracer Professional 300’s design

For the Aquaracer Professional 300 launch collection, TAG Heuer’s designers worked with a clear concept – to create a bold, high-performance, ergonomic watch for divers that was distinctively TAG Heuer. On top of that, they wanted to respect the company’s divers’ watch tradition while delivering design and material refinements that would meet and exceed the high expectations of today’s customer. No easy task!

This meant working with the Aquaracer collection’s six signature features and updating and upgrading them. Since 1983, the collection has always offered a unidirectional rotating bezel, a screw-down crown, water resistance to at least 200 metres, luminous markings, a sapphire glass and a double safety clasp – real-world functions that divers know to rely on in the deep.

To start, the team turned to the most visually arresting and immediately recognisable element of the Aquaracer’s design – its 12-sided unidirectional rotating bezel. The designers kept the basic form and evolved it, integrating a scratch-resistant ceramic insert across the collection and fluting each of the 12 facets so the bezel would be easy to grip and turn, no matter which facets the wearer is holding.