RICHARD Mille celebrates its partnership with Ferrari, forged in 2021 over a shared quest for perfection, with the creation of an ultra-flat RM UP-01 Ferrari.
At just 1.75mm thick, the first watch in this partnership does not only exhibit technical prowess, but exemplifies a new approach to watch mechanics in which technical aspect dictates aesthetics.
It is a result of dozens of prototypes and more than 6,000 hours of development and laboratory testing.
“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,” Boillat adds.
In place of a traditional movement with superimposed gears and hands, Richard Mille opted to distribute over a broader surface area what could not be stacked.
A perfect symbiosis between the movement and case was thus created, each ensuring the necessary rigidity of the other.
The RM UP-01 manual-winding movement with hours, minutes and function selector – capable of withstanding accelerations of more than 5,000G – boasts a thickness of mere 1.18mm, a weight of 2.82g and a power reserve of 45 hours.
The baseplate and skeletonised bridges are made of grade 5 titanium, which guarantees perfect flatness and strength.
The patented extra flat barrel is fitted with an extraordinarily fine hairspring and the architecture of the escapement is entirely redesigned.
“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,” says Salvador Arbona, who is the Richard Mille technical director for movements.
“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,” he adds.
Titanium was chosen as the material for the case, which is water resistant to 10m, for the advantages it offers in combining lightness and resistance.
The two sapphire crystals – one over the time indicators and another positioned over the regulator to showcase the movement’s operation – were also reduced in thickness to two-tenths of a millimetre.
The narrow tolerance range and extreme slenderness of each part required the focus to be particularly meticulous and checked at almost every stage of machining.
The collaboration between Richard Mille and Ferrari, most visibly expressed in the choice of materials and execution of the watch, also lent the project the competitive spirit so essential in the most exhilarating adventures.
This timepiece bears witness to this partnership of the best know-how these two iconic brands have to offer in the combination of their ideas, understanding, respective developments and shared values.
Like the prestigious Italian automotive legend – and consistent with the standards of the Richard Mille manufacture – the 150 limited-edition timepieces in the RM UP-01 Ferrari series combine innovation with performance strength and aesthetics.
