Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. are having the season of their lives this year, but for the rest of the year, it may be the Richard Mille on their wrist that garners the most attention.
Richard Mille just debuted the Richard Mille RM UP-01 Ferrari, the world’s thinnest timepiece, and it’s perhaps the most stunning model yet from the Swiss ultra-luxury watchmaking brand.
The most ambitious result of the 2021 partnership between Richard Mille and Ferrari is an astounding achievement, a 1.75 mm thick watch that took over 6,000 hours of development and laboratory testing to achieve, a watch that is a distillation of Richard Mille’s startling ambition and Ferrari’s boundary-pushing heritage.
The ultra-flat watch meant that the brand couldn’t go for a traditional movement with superimposed gears and hands. To achieve the feat, Richard Mille opted to distribute what could not be stacked over a broader surface area by creating a symbiosis between the movement and case, each ensuring the necessary rigidity of the other, according to the brand.
As a result, the RMUP-01 manual-winding movement with hours, minutes and function selector – capable of withstanding accelerations of more than 5,000 g’s – =boasts a thickness of 1.18 millimetres, a weight of 2.82 grams, and a power reserve of 45 hours.
‘For such a project, it was necessary to set aside all the knowledge we had amassed over years of practice, and every conceivable standard of watchmaking,’ explains Julien Boillat, Technical Director for Cases at Richard Mille. ‘This is precisely what we did throughout our collaboration with the laboratories of Audemars Piguet Le Locle. Shaving off those last millimetres of depth was an extremely demanding and lengthy process.’
The model took years work to achieve, with the brand was determined to retain a traditional architecture in which the movement is assembled within the case, rather than a construction in which the caseback doubles as a baseplate, in order to ensure under any circumstances total shock resistance, with many prototypes thrown out along the way, ultimately settling on a baseplate and skeletonised bridges crafted of grade 5 titanium.
The patented extra flat barrel is fitted with an extraordinarily fine hairspring and the architecture ofthe escapement was entirely redesigned. To reduce depth, the small plate ofthe balance and dart (guard pin) – two parts that prevent the anchor from slipping back during the free phase of the balance wheel’s movement – were eliminated. The new ultra-flat escapement, also patented, replaced these ‘anti-reversal’ elements with an elongated fork with new horns.
Likewise, the index was set aside in favour of a variable-inertia balance crafted in titanium whose six weights allow for fine-tuned calibration ofthe regulating organ. To deliver a watch this thin, it was also necessary by rethinking the winding mechanism and to eliminate the winding stem, whose minimum diameter of 1.5 millimetres precluded its inclusion in such a slim watch. In its place,the two crowns, one for function selection, the other to utilise the selected function, have both been integrated in the case as movement wheels.
“Even in the realm of extreme flatness, we were determined to make a watch that met the same validation requirements as all our other models. In this quest for absolute flatness, we had to offer a watch that, far from being a ‘concept watch’, was up to the task of following a user’s daily life, whatever the circumstances,’ added Salvador Arbona, Technical Director for Movements at Richard Mille.
The model is limited to 150 pieces.
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