The link between perfect TAG Heuer replica watches and racing is about as strong as ordering a whiskey neat.
I grew up in Indianapolis going to the Indy 500, where a TAG Heuer logo atop the Speedway’s Pagoda casts a shadow over the track. But there’s rare vintage cheap UK TAG Heuer Carrera fake watches coming to auction that reiterates the connection more than any childhood nostalgia: a rare Heuer Carrera 3647 with a Sunray DX logo that tells another chapter of this connection is part of Sotheby’s Fine Watches sale this month.
The TAG Heuer Carrera replica watches for men comes from the original owner, Gary Goss. Gary joined the Sunray DX racing team in 1967, just as the team hit its stride thanks to Chevrolet dealer and car tuner Don Yenko, who was known for making Chevys go faster. Just 21, Gary became the racing team’s hauler and a pilot, getting the Sunray DX team and its cars wherever they needed to go across the country.
At the end of the ’67 racing season, the team manager gave Gary and a few other team members Swiss made TAG Heuer Carrera copy watches with the red, white, and blue Sunray DX logo printed at 6 o’clock. According to Jeff Stein of On The Dash, it came with the words, “You earned it.”
“Probably only 12 of these watches were made, and Goss was standing there when they were handing them out to the other team members too,” Jeff Stein of On The Dash told me. Stein published the full story of the Corvette, Sunray DX, and the Carrera on his site – I recommend giving it a read.
Stein said that this AAA replica TAG Heuer Sunray DX Carrera watches really represents an important time for Chevy, when “Sunray DX and Yenko finally succeeded in building the ultimate performance Corvette that could finally take on the Shelby Cobra.”
By the mid-1960s, oil company Sunray DX sponsored a number of regional races and teams. But in 1967 it went all in, funding a full-time racing program. Its first car purchase? A Corvette from Yenko Chevrolet, and Don Yenko became the team’s lead driver. And not just any Corvette: the first one with a super-charged L-88 engine.
While Chevy introduced the Corvette in 1953, it fell behind Ford in performance in 1962, when Carroll Shelby created the Cobra, putting a Ford V8 engine in a sports car.
By 1967, Chevrolet finally had its response: the L-88 Corvette, a thinly veiled race car designed to go fast. Don Yenko secured the first production model just weeks before the 12 Hours of Sebring, one leg of the “triple crown” of endurance racing, along with Le Mans and Daytona. Yenko would go on to win his class at Sebring, which would become the beginning of a hugely successful racing run for the Sunray DX team.
The peak came at the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1968, when Yenko, along with the other two L-88 Sunray DX Corvettes pulled even to take a steep bank side-by-side.
As for Gary Goss, after his short stint as a pilot and hauler with Sunray DX, he moved to Florida where he had a long career in law enforcement with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. In addition to being a police officer, he logged more than 8,000 hours as a pilot. Most of the time, the Sunray DX Carrera he received in the summer of 1967 was on his wrist. As you can see, it’s on a Seiko bracelet, which I absolutely love.
As we covered in our Carrera Reference Points, there are a number of different racing- and car-related logos that can be found on top super clone TAG Heuer Carrera watches over the years.
“To me, the great thing about the [Sunray DX Carrera] is that it’s connected to an important car – a fantastic looking logo and car – and it’s straight from the original owner,” Stein said. He said it ranks right near the top in terms of logo-dial Carreras. “I’d rather have a racing watch like this than a dealer watch,” he added.
“The movie was Ford vs. Ferrari, but growing up in the U.S. in the ‘60s, my friends didn’t pay much attention to Ferrari,” Stein said. “If you were turning 16, you were either a Ford or a Chevy guy.”
And this Sunray DX Carrera tells the story of the L-88 Corvette, the high quality TAG Heuer fake watches that finally let Chevy take on, and beat, Ford and Carroll Shelby.