The TAG Heuer Mikrogirder has won this year’s Aiguille d’Or – the top prize at the Grand Prix de l’Horlogerie de Geneve.
TAG Heuer president and CEO Jean-Christophe Babin said the company was “absolutely ecstatic” to win the most coveted prize in the global watch industry.
“We’re very proud of this achievement,” he said.
“We’ve won our share of Grand Prix over the years but this is the first time we have been singled out as the best overall watch in all categories,” he said.
He said TAG overturned 300 years of watchmaking conventions to create a totally new mechanical regulator for the Mikrogirder – “instead of the spiral shape in a classical hairspring, it works with a coupling beam/girder and excitatory beam/girder system and a linear oscillator.”
Conceived, developed and manufactured in-house by TAG, the new regulator is “the fastest mechanical regulator ever crafted and tested”
“We are grateful to the jury for acknowledging this breakthrough,” said Babin.
“The Mikrogirder changes the way mechanical energy is generated, stored and regulated. It opens apromising new era in watchmaking with potentially powerful and energy-sparing new movements precise to ever-smaller fractions of time.
“We’re already well underway to fully exploring the possibilities.”
The Mikrogirder is “a 5/10,000th of a second chronograph beating at 1000 Hz or 7,200,000 beats per hour, and is accurate to an unprecedented 5/10,000 or 1/2,000th of a second”.
The category winners at the Grand Prix de l’Horlogerie de Genève were:
- Ladies’ Watch: Chanel, Flying Tourbillon Première
- Men’s Watch: MB&F, Legacy Machine N°1
- Innovation Watch: HYT, H1 Titanium Black DLC
- Jewellery and Artistic Crafts Watch: Chopard, Imperiale Tourbillon Full Set
- Best Complicated Watch: Greubel Forsey, Invention Piece 2
- Sports Watch: Habring2, Doppel 2.0
- ‘La Petite Aiguille’ Watch: Zenith, Pilot Big Date Special
- Best Watchmaker: Carole Forestier Kasapi
- Special Jury Prize: Société Suisse de Chronométrie (SSC)