TAG Heuer gets back on track for the F1

As TAG Heuer returns as official timekeeper of the F1, success will be measured in several ways. Including emotional resonance.

F1 has become one of the most desirable sports in the world.

Antoine Pin, the newly installed chief executive of TAG Heuer, says that lights down at the F1 Louis Vuitton Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne next week, will be “a moment of truth”.

“It’s the moment when everything happens, so we are on the starting line and who knows? Every team has been putting all their energy to develop the new cars. The drivers are ready, are fitter than ever … It’s better than any movie,” he tells The Australian over a Zoom from the Swiss watch brand’s HQ in Switzerland.

“It’s a major statement for TAG Heuer. First, we are back where we belong, we have been present for more than 60 years and have fundamentally been associated (with) this sport in a consistent way. It’s a statement of power as well as we can stand it today, maybe better than in the past,” he says.

Ayrton Senna had a long association with TAG Heuer.

The stakes are indeed high for TAG Heuer. The brand was the first to partner with a team in the ’60s and Jack Heuer, great grandson of the brand’s founder, famously shilled stop watches at races and named watch collections for famous races, including, yes, F1.

TAG Heuer has been associated with Ayrton Senna and a TAG Heuer Monaco was worn by Steve McQueen in the classic race car film Le Mans. Last week the brand announced it had become official partner and official timekeeper of the F1 Academy, an organisation that supports female participation in the sport. Just last week, Melbourne teenager Aiva Anagnostiadis was announced as the first Australian woman to enter the academy. Another Melbourne local, Joanne Ciconte, was named this week.

The return as official timekeeper (the brand last held the role from 1992-2003) is part of TAG Heuer owner LVMH’s major investment in F1. Last year it announced a 10-year partnership with the sport. Melbourne is the first race on the circuit.

The partnership involves several of its brands, including Champagne house Moet & Chandon as official champagne sponsor for trackside sipping and podium spraying, and Louis Vuitton, which will craft the custom trunks to house the trophy. In Melbourne the largest luxury brand in the world takes on naming rights, with the race christened the F1 Louis Vuitton Australian Grand Prix Melbourne. TAG Heuer will be the title sponsor in Monaco in May.

This major investment by some of the world’s most famous luxury brands speaks to the growth and resonance of F1 too. This is partly thanks to the success of Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive fly-on-the-wall documentary series, social media and the push of F1 into America where it once didn’t have the same traction as other markets. The F1 now has a market cap of around $38bn and, according to a December report by Neilson Sports, is the most followed sport in the world.

“The elevation of the sport has been spectacular,” says TAG Heuer heritage director Nicholas Biebuyck, a lifelong F1 obsessive who says he cried when the partnership was announced.

Jack Heuer was known to sell stop watches at races and name watch collections for famous car races.

Biebuyck thinks the allure can partly be attributed to what he calls the “pursuit of excellence”.

“Whether it’s a lap time or whether it’s a craft, this sense of innovation. It’s central to TAG Heuer, but of course it’s there, present in motorsport but in fact, it’s also present in luxury.”

The genuine affinity between motorsport and TAG Heuer is, as George Ciz, chief marketing officer at TAG Heuer and a former professional tennis player, says, a marketer’s dream.

“We really celebrate the essence that people have in themselves to find that motivation to surpass themselves, whether it’s physically, emotionally, professionally, in every walk of life. And that’s what makes us very different because we are the brand that lives in the moment,” Ciz says.

“And when you think of Formula One, there is no better kind of visual metaphor to show this, right?”

The brand is already seeing results in terms of organic social media reach and traffic to its stores. This is something Ciz says is essential for judging the success of the partnership.

TAG Heuer's new F1 Chronograph watches, launched earlier this year.

Certainly, we can expect the brand to capitalise on the connection, such as with the launch earlier this year at LVMH Watch Week of new F1 novelties with an added chronograph (stopwatch function) in a slew of colours.

As Biebuyck notes, the saying in motorsport has long been: “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.”

Yet as both Ciz and Nicholas Biebuyck – who spent hours poring over archival footage to share with the brand’s content and marketing teams – point out, it’s also a stake in the ground for the brand. Quite literally on the racetrack, actually, when it comes to the pit lane exit clock and other branding moments.

“Of course the commercial objectives are great, and of course we want this to result in more sales, but for us it’s a much bigger moment for the brand at large,” says Biebuyck.

“Part of the reason that we’ve got the deal with Formula One was because they want our support in telling the stories and elevating the brand in a new way. And of course, we want the connection to the glamour and the innovation and the human strength and resilience that is deeply connected to Formula One.

“I think if we can show how these shared philosophies resonate between us, that’s what makes it again even more authentic and even more powerful.”

Antoine Pin says the extremity of F1, and its surrounding super fandom, is about an emotional connection too.

It’s something he believes LVMH as a group brings to the event. Proof found earlier in the group’s €150m ($251m) investment in the Paris Olympic Games.

“We have this know-how. We know how to leverage on the event. We know how to enhance the side aspects of the race itself, expose the glamour of it, expose the tensions that can appear in such a highly competitive world in the most positive way,” Pin says. “That’s probably why the world of F1 was quite welcoming to us. And I think this is what we will be doing, really providing people across the world with a deeper insight.

“And we will probably leverage even more on emotional tensions because that’s clearly what’s making this world of Formula One extremely vibrant, in a way. You want to see those emotional elements above and beyond the race, the thrill of the tensions of the race.”