Jason Statham wears a TAG Heuer Carrera

There is a moment in Crank, the 2006 action picture directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, when Chev Chelios sits in the back of a car with a phone to his ear. For once, he is sitting still. Almost nothing else in the movie is. Chelios is a Los Angeles hitman who has been injected with a synthetic drug his enemies call the Beijing Cocktail, and it works by inhibiting his adrenaline, slowing his heart, and killing him if he lets himself calm down. So he refuses to calm down. He fights, he runs, he does whatever will keep his pulse up, for the eighty-eight minutes the film lasts. In the car, for a second or two, the camera finds his wrist, and there is a chronograph on a steel bracelet.

The watch is a TAG Heuer Carrera. Even in a moving frame you can see what it is: a black dial, a tachymeter scale ringing the edge, the small sub-dials of a chronograph sitting low on the face, all of it on a brushed steel bracelet. This is the Calibre 16, the self-winding chronograph version, a forty-one millimeter steel case wrapped around a sturdy automatic movement. On Statham it reads as exactly what it is, a working steel sports watch on a man in a printed shirt who is trying very hard not to die.

The name on the dial has a stranger history than the movie lets on. The Carrera is called after a race that got people killed. In 1963, a year after he took charge of the family watch company, Jack Heuer launched it. He had heard the stories about the Carrera Panamericana, an open road race that ran the entire length of Mexico, border to border, more than three thousand kilometers, with almost no safety to speak of. It was held five years running, from 1950 to 1954. More than two dozen people died over those five years. Then it was stopped, judged too dangerous to hold again. Heuer liked the name, and he put it on a chronograph built for the drivers themselves, a watch made for timing a race.