TAG Heuer Honors Ayrton Senna with Pair of New Chronographs

32 years ago today, Ayrton Senna claimed what would be his final victory in F1 at the 1993 Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide. As we head into the late racer’s home Grand Prix in São Paulo, Brazil for the 21st round of the 2025 Formula 1 season, TAG Heuer is taking the opportunity to celebrate his life with a pair of new Formula 1 Chronograph watches, and one of them provides a nod to the link bracelet worn by the man himself. Both watches bear shades of the Brazilian flag to make the connection abundantly clear, and it’s a fitting moment coming in a year when a new young Brazilian driver, Gabriel Bortoleto, is making his first F1 start in his home country. The watches offer an opportunity to look back at some of the boldest watches from TAG Heuer of the early 90’s, and how they’ve managed to recapture it in 2025. 

1993 was a year dominated by the William-Renault Formula 1 team, with their drivers Alain Prost and Damon Hill claiming victory in 10 of the 16 races that season. Senna would take five of the remaining, while a young Michael Schumacher would nab the final, just his second win in F1. A win at the final race in Australia helped him secure second in the Driver’s Championship, four points clear of Hill. This season, and to be honest, the prior season and half (Williams was a pretty dominant team from mid 1991 onward), would precipitate Senna’s move from the McLaren-Honda team to the Williams-Renault team for the 1994 season, which would be tragically cut short just three races into the season at Imola. 

Most of us associate Senna with his time at McLaren-Honda, from hooning an NSX around Suzuka in loafers, to casually rocking the most ‘90s watch ever from TAG Heuer, a S/el, ref. S25.706C on a brown leather strap. To make the full circle connection here, Honda engines currently power the Red Bull Racing F1 cars, which are sponsored by TAG Heuer, though next year the team will switch to a unit built in collaboration with Ford. Senna would ultimately end up giving the watch to a mechanic on the McLaren test team, Ron Pellat, before heading over to Williams for the ‘94 season. Senna was photographed wearing a number of variations of this watch during his time at McLaren, and his relationship with the brand didn’t end when he left the team. In fact, one of his final commercial contract signings was with TAG Heuer, for what would have been a co-signed collection of watches in the pipeline. 

Truly, it would seem that his enthusiasm for the brand was genuine. TAG Heuer continues to have a relationship with his estate, and honors their history with the man in ways that look to capture that same ‘90s spirit, and nowhere is that more evident than in one of these new watches being released this week: the 43mm TAG Heuer Formula 1 Chronograph x Senna. Like the S/el, this is a quartz chronograph, and while it doesn’t share the same framework (which is likely a good thing for today’s sensibilities), it does share a similar bracelet structure that was popularized by TAG Heuer in the ‘90s. This will undoubtedly tap into a nostalgia for any enthusiasts that were into watches in this era.

The rest of the watch is pretty straightforward, and is exactly what you’d expect in the modern Formula 1 collection. It does get a yellow, green, and blue sub-dial at six o’clock in a nod to Senna’s Brazilian heritage, and the Senna name appears on the tachymeter bezel. The real story with this one is the bracelet, though. This is the best rendition of the design I’ve seen in decades outside of the modern Link collection, and I just think there could be an appetite for its expanded use in unexpected ways. Perhaps even with a rubber or leather strap affixed to it. 

The early ‘90s was a very different time for watch design, with far more expressive risks being taken even by large brands. Tapping into a bit of that culture would be a welcome change for a lot of brands operating today. If they could manage to tease out the interesting qualities and interpret them in a more broadly palatable manner, that is. And that’s exactly what TAG Heuer has done here. TAG Heuer