The Goodwood Festival of Speed opened on Thursday for its 2026 running, 9 to 12 July on the Duke of Richmond's estate in West Sussex. TAG Heuer is back as Official Timing Partner for the second consecutive year, with a pop-up devoted to its motorsport history and the Porsche 917 that Steve McQueen drove in the 1971 film Le Mans as its centrepiece. It also brought a watch that stays on the estate: the Monaco Chronograph x Goodwood Festival of Speed 2026, limited to 71 pieces and sold only at the brand's festival booth.
The conservative Monaco, deliberately
TAG Heuer's recent Monaco programme has leaned technical: the Flyback with the TH-Carbonspring carbon hairspring, the split-seconds models, the Evergraph and its compliant mechanisms. For Goodwood the brand went the other way and used the standard automatic Monaco as the base, crown at 3 o'clock rather than the McQueen re-edition's left-hand placement. The square steel case measures 39mm across, 15mm thick and 47mm lug to lug, with a bevelled sapphire crystal, a sapphire caseback held by four screws and 100m of water resistance.
Racing green, beige counters, one red mark
The dial is where the festival brief shows. The base is British Racing Green lacquer over a sunray finish, with the two square counters and the circular minute ring rendered in beige for a parchment-on-green look that reads more 1960s sports car than modern chronograph. The subdial hands are red, the central seconds hand carries a chequered flag at its tip, and there is a single red marking on the minute track at 39 seconds. That is not decoration: it points to the festival's standing hillclimb record, set in 2022 by the McMurtry Spéirling driven by Max Chilton, as Monochrome Watches notes in its introduction of the piece.
TH20-00 behind a Goodwood-stamped back
Inside is the calibre TH20-00, TAG Heuer's in-house automatic chronograph with column wheel and vertical clutch, running at 28,800 vibrations per hour with 33 jewels and an 80-hour power reserve. The sapphire back carries the Goodwood Festival of Speed logo over the openworked rotor, and each caseback is individually numbered out of 71. The strap is vintage-style brown calf, perforated in the racing manner, on a folding clasp with double safety pushers.
At the booth, and only there
The Monaco x Goodwood Festival of Speed 2026 costs GBP 7,750 and is sold exclusively from TAG Heuer's booth while the festival runs through Sunday. It follows the Formula 1 Automatic Chronograph x Gulf as the brand's second partner edition of the summer, and the pattern is consistent: modest volumes, event-specific detailing, prices close to the standard collection. Event editions live or die on whether the tie-in feels earned. A racing green Monaco with the hillclimb record marked in red at 39 seconds, sold within earshot of the hill itself, makes a more coherent case than most.
