We're seeing some new faces come to the fold lately and with that, new reasons for starting a Heuer collection.

It's something I always find interesting, so it would be good to know what got people started with their collections.

For me, I've always been a collector of sorts, even from childhood; starting with the usual coins and stamps, moving on to minerals and fossils and various things in between. Car and motor-racing themes started to get involved with the collection from double-figure years, I guess, and after an early dalliance with 911s, 917s and 356s, my colours were nailed to the Ferrari mast. With some room for BMW too, Munich having been one of my favourite cities since first visiting in my early teens and then seeing the first waves of bewinged E30 M3s being driven to the dealerships on a later visit - proper car that :)

So, one of the things I started to collect was Autocourse annuals ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocourse ), which has been round almost as long as the F1 world championship itself. And having first become aware of F1 during the mid-70s or so, and being a Ferrari fan, it was those red cars that caught my attention the most. With their prominent Heuer stickers. So that sowed a seed, associating Heuer watches with racing and Ferrari and also my favourite driver, the late, lamented Gilles Villeneuve. And definitely Heuer rather than TAG-Heuer - I associated them with that awful grey team (no offence to Bruce, they were an orange team then anyway).

Having been through one watch collection (two if you count the number of Swatches I had through college as a collection, including a quite nice "panda" chrono), I then turned my eye to the classic Heuers. And in particular to the Carrera. It just appealed to me more than the others, it seemed the racing watch schlechthin (German word, but it expresses what I mean well - at least, it does if you understand German, but I'll gloss over that!). It might seem an artificial restriction, but then I like themed collections and if you look at how many entries we have on the OTD Carrera table, well, it's hardly a restriction at all!

I thought it best to start where the Carrera started, but I liked the utility of the Dato, so after looking around a while, and missing out on a few, the collection started with:

And grew from there. The collection happily coexists with other collections (Autocourse, maples) and also things I seem to have a lot of but don't think of as collections (CDs, DVDs, laptops(!)). I've toyed with the idea of trying other Heuers, but if I were to change watch I think I'd jump brand altogether and go with Speedies - there's still scope in Carreras yet, though, and any other watch collection would have to fight for elbow space with them, the Carreras are going nowhere!

It would be great to know what the inspiration was for other people to start collecting - no need to go on at the length I have, but it would be interesting to see if we're all like minds or have vastly disparate reasons for collecting (the truth will of course be somewhere in the middle, but it's no fun to say that :) ).

So: What got YOU started? And why Heuer?