The king of the hyperwatch is back – Richard Mille, watchmaker to the rich, the famous and the uncommonly powerful, has just announced the RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail, a 106-piece limited-edition with an eye-watering price tag set to be around £850,000. Richard Mille claims it’s the “most extreme watch” it has ever made. For that money, you’d certainly hope so.
But really, most extreme? Given Richard Mille has routinely pushed the watchmaking envelope in the two decades since it was founded, that’s some claim. So what’s it done?
The story begins two and half years ago when McLaren Automotive unveiled the Speedtail, its sublime three-seat grand tourer that, with a top speed of 250mph, became the fastest road-going car the Woking marque had ever produced. Off the back of it, Richard Mille, which first partnered with McLaren Automotive five years ago, set about creating a watch that could match the hypercar’s profile.
And the RM 40-01 is it. The extremes begin with just how much time and effort has gone into it. Take the ultra-lightweight case, for example, which is tear-drop-shaped like the Speedtail’s aerial silhouette and even with the movement inside it weighs less than 60 grams. It’s made of Carbon TPT and Grade 5 titanium, has 69 parts and took 2,800 hours to perfect. The movement, dubbed CRMT4, took a further 8,600 hours of development. Even the “triple-contoured” sapphire crystal over the dial required 18 months of R&D.
Then there’s a “first” combination of functions. Chief among those is a new in-house power-reserve indicator at nine o’clock, which sits alongside an oversized date, Richard Mille’s signature function selector at three o’clock (showing whether the crown is in winding, setting or neutral mode), and an automatic tourbillon (the horological totem that offsets the effects of gravity on a stationary watch).
That’s not all. One of the details that helps explain the watch’s singularity is its “variable-geometry rotor”, quite possibly the most esoteric function ever integrated into a watch. It gives the wearer control over the rate at which the rotor (the freely oscillating weight that charges an automatic watch) spins, based on how active they’re likely to be while wearing it.
So if you’re feeling frisky, you may want to push the red gold segment to the rotor’s centre to slow the winding down. On the other hand, if you’re languishing like a lounge lizard, move it to the outer edge so that when you do lift a finger, your watch winds more efficiently.
Those familiar with the British automotive marque will recognise some of the visual cues that link watch and car. The overall form is one of them, as is the canopy-shaped section running through the centre of the watch. More obvious is the engraving of the word Speedtail into the case at six o’clock and the flash of McLaren orange that runs through the lower part of the dial and into the black rubber strap, mirroring the Speedtail’s central tail light. And, like the car, only 106 RM 40-01 watches will be made.
The Speedtail, which was pitched as the spiritual successor to McLaren’s iconic F1, sold out in a flash. Secondhand models, sometimes with only factory miles on the clock, are already commanding values well over $3 million, significantly above the original start price. Buyers of Richard Mille’s new hyperwatch will be hoping it proves just as collectible.
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