Hodinkee has once again teamed up with TAG Heuer for a limited edition Carrera. This new edition, available today, is a follow up to the hugely successful Limited Edition Skipper released all the way back in the summer of 2017. The TAG Heuer Carrera ?Dato? Limited Edition for Hodinkee is a wildly different take on a similar format, the single register chronograph. Whereas the Skipper is colorful, light, and fun, the Dato has a sober quality to it, with its jet black dial, polished hour markers, and high contrast white sub register. It?s also a cap on a remarkable resurgence in Carrera releases over the last year, which have run the gamut in styles and points of influence. 

The idea behind this watch is relatively straightforward: get as close as possible to the original Heuer 3147N ?Dato 45? as possible. That watch featured a 9:00 date window and a single sub register at 3:00 counting elapsed minutes. As you?re no doubt aware if you have a passing interest in modern chronographs, this is not a layout that?s particularly common, and it required TAG to re-engineer their Caliber 02 movement for this release to mimic the unique ?cyclops? design of the original. 
The dial on this modern interpretation is simple at first glance, but there are a ton of little details that make it special. Notice, for example, the small lume plots at the outside of each hour marker (with a double plot at the 12:00 position). Modern watches tend to have far more prominent lume fil...