The Aquaracer before the Aquaracer

My first purchase on Chrono24 was a watch that today is not on my wrist, and hasn’t even left the house. A TAG Heuer 2000 Professional, reference WK1212, second generation, quartz, straight from Japan. Even though 35 mm is a good size, with the bezel it ends up looking too small on my wrist: too much rim, not enough dial. It stays in the family as an authentic GADA, just on my wife’s wrists instead.

It was a watch bought half in the dark, for the history, and the history turned out better than I knew at the time.

A diver’s watch for people who don’t dive

Heuer was a house of chronographs. Dive watches came late, and for a practical reason: Jack Heuer saw at a sporting goods fair how many “diving” watches were being sold to people who never dived, and decided to enter that market with a rugged line, Rolex-style, but with a quartz movement. The first was reference 844, from 1978, a 42 mm case made in France by Georges Monnin, dial with the 13-to-24 numerals in red. That family grew to more than forty models, and it was what kept the company afloat during the quartz crisis years. The name, series 1000, only showed up in the 1984 catalogue, by which time the next line was already on the shelf.

The 2000 series came in 1982, four years after the 844, to fix what that family didn’t. Designed by Eddy Schöpfer, who would later design the S/el, it had a flatter, more elegant case than the earlier diver, rectangular lugs instead of curved ones, a new bracelet, and a bezel treated as a design element, not just a functional one. The idea was a watch that could take water and still pass for a city watch. It was, before anyone used the word, a GADA.

Six promises

It was the brand’s first model to carry the “six features” that the catalogues would repeat for twenty years: water resistance to 200 metres, a screw-down crown, a unidirectional rotating bezel, a sapphire crystal, luminous markers, and a double-locking bracelet clasp. None of this was Heuer’s invention. What was new was selling the whole package, by name, as a selling point, on a quartz watch that cost a fraction of a Submariner.

The dial text, “Professional 200 Meters”, comes from that. In the early years the word “Professional” only appeared on that model line, and it’s one of the details collectors use to tell whether a dial is original or a service replacement.

Heuer, TAG Heuer, same case

The watch was born at the company’s worst moment. In 1982, the same year it launched, Jack Heuer sold his shares to a group led by Valentin Piaget, crushed by quartz-crisis debt despite good sales. In June 1985 TAG, Techniques d’Avant Garde, Akram Ojjeh’s group, which was already backing McLaren in Formula 1, bought Heuer. On 1 January 1986 the name became TAG Heuer.

The 2000 series went through the change without changing. Early ones say “Heuer” on the dial; later ones say “TAG Heuer”; the case, the movement and the factory are the same, and today the two sell at different premiums over one word. It was also the watch the new owner used to introduce itself: 1986 brought the colourful plastic Formula 1, 1987 the S/el, and 1991 the “Don’t crack under pressure” campaign with Senna. For anyone who grew up in Brazil that decade, TAG Heuer is the Senna brand before it’s anything else, and the 2000 was the entry model in the window.

Four generations

The line stayed in production for 22 years. The first generation, from 1982 to 1994, had either the flat aluminium bezel or the one with rectangular claws. 1995 brought the second, mine: a twelve-sided bezel with large claws, metal-framed markers, and a bigger “12”. In 1998 the third split the family into Classic, Exclusive and Sport. By 2004 the fourth generation was already leaving the catalogue under a different dial name, “2000 Aquaracer”, with 300 metres instead of 200 and round markers again.

On references: until 1992 the codes had six digits, and the last two gave the size (06 for 42 mm, 13 for 38, 15 for 32, 08 for 28). After that came the letters: WE for the first 2000 generation, WK for the second, WN for the Exclusive. My WK1212 is the mid-size of the second generation, with an ETA quartz movement, sapphire, and the 200 metres. Listings disagree on the diameter: mine said 35 mm, others say 38 for the same reference, and one WK1211 owner measured 33.5. I measured mine: 35 mm across the bezel alone, 38 mm with the crown — which might explain the disagreement between listings: one of them was measuring one thing, the other, something else.

What’s left of it

In 2005 TAG Heuer retired all the numbered names, and what had been the 2000 series simply became Aquaracer. The name disappeared; the design didn’t. My watch’s rectangular lugs are still in today’s catalogue, the 2021 Aquaracer Professional 300 deliberately went back to my generation’s twelve-sided bezel, and the 200 metres became 300. The rest of the six promises stayed the same.

I bought it in January 2026, and the watch only arrived a month later. It was the purchase that taught me to measure before clicking buy. The size in a listing doesn’t tell you what a bezel does to a dial, and a watch that looks good in a 1995 photo can get lost on a 2026 wrist.