For Richard Mille, the man, a future that involved the McLaren car brand was all but written in the stars. A lifelong automobile enthusiast, his passion dates back to 1966, when he was just 15 years old and his father took him to the Monaco Grand Prix, where he saw Bruce McLaren driving his M2B, the very first McLaren Formula 1 car. He recalls vividly the ‘absolutely terrifying’ sound of the Ford engine, which was really intended to power the McLaren Can-Am car in the Indianapolis 500. It was partly this personal experience that instilled a deep-seated passion for the carmaker which led Richard Mille to enter into a long-term partnership with McLaren in February 2016.
As Richard Mille enters the fifth year of its ongoing partnership with the luxury British supercar maker McLaren Automotive, the two brands are delighted to reveal the result of their latest and most ambitious collaboration to date —the new Richard Mille RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail. A watch that can be summed in five prototypes that were developed, 8,600 hours of development for the movement construction, 672 components, a 5000 g-shock test, and 18 months of development for the new case shape.
As the name suggests, this remarkable and unique watch honors the fastest, most advanced, and most exotic road car McLaren has yet produced —the futuristic Speedtail. Based on the form of a teardrop, the most aerodynamically efficient shape found in nature, the Speedtail is the apotheosis of the streamlined hypercar, a three-seat grand tourer that became the fourth car in McLaren's ultimate range.
The Richard Mille RM 40-01 watch complements this most special of cars by combining its shape, its materials, and the philosophy behind it with Richard Mille's own ethos of technical excellence and unique, ground-breaking design. To reflect the 106 McLaren Speedtails manufactured, there will only be 106 Richard Mille RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail watches manufactured.
The McLaren Speedtail has been hailed as one of the most remarkable and breathtaking car designs of all time. Conceived to be radical in both form and function, it is a man-made machine that owes its inspiration to one of the purest forms of all—the teardrop. Seen from above, the car's silhouette resembles that of a single water droplet, the most aerodynamically efficient shape found in nature and the one used as the starting point for what has become the ultimate streamlined grand tourer. A hand-picked team of no fewer than a dozen aerodynamics experts worked on the Speedtail's form, which involved the design and creation of some of the most advanced airflow systems ever seen on a car of any type.
The scientifically-developed wind-cheating enhancements —ranging from air intakes at the side of the Speedtail's headlamps to a roof-mounted NACA duct and from a streamlined underbody to a pair of flexible, rear-mounted ailerons— enable its 1,055 horsepower hybrid powertrain to push the all-carbon car to top speeds of 250 miles per hour —402 kph—, making it the fastest McLaren ever built. With its central driving position and three-seat configuration reminiscent of that seen in the legendary F1 of the 1990s, the Speedtail has been called ‘the spiritual successor to the original Ultimate Series car and, like the F1, production was limited to the 106 examples built at McLaren Automotive's state-of-the-art production facility in Woking, England, during a 12-month run beginning in February 2020.
“As well as taking inspiration from the teardrop shape of the Speedtail, we also faced the challenge of seamlessly combining existing Richard Mille cues with those of McLaren.” Julien Boillat, Casing Technical Director.
Things to Know About the Watch
The bezel and case back are made of grade 5 titanium whilst the caseband is made of Carbon TPT. This is a remarkable material with a unique finish obtained by layering hundreds of sheets of carbon fibers using an automated process that changes the orientation of the weft between layers. Heated to 120-degree Celsius in an autoclave similar to those used for aeronautic components, the material is then ready to be machined at Richard Mille. The tripartite case —in titanium and Carbon TPT— is water-resistant to 50 meters ensured by 2 Nitrile O-ring seals. The case measuring 41.80 x 48.25 x 14.15 mm is assembled with 12 grade 5 titanium spline screws and abrasion-resistant washers in 316 L stainless steel. The skeletonized dial features an oversize semi-instantaneous date aperture at 12 o’clock functioning via two skeletonized calendar discs over a white field and a power reserve indicator at 9 o’clock powered by a planetary differential.
It took Richard Mille's casing department, led by Julien Boillat, an unprecedented 2,800 hours spread over 18 months to perfect the lines. Due to the unprecedented complexity of the design, five prototypes were created before the optimum shape was achieved. The challenge lay in the fact that the case is significantly wider at 12 o'clock than at 6 o'clock.
To protect the RM 40-01's state-of-the-art movement, Richard Mille developed a unique upper crystal glass featuring a 'triple contour' to account for the decreasing taper and thickness of the bezel. The attention to detail is extreme, with mirror polished, plain, and satinized effects in different areas and the combined use of titanium and Carbon TPT. The case itself is made from 69 individual parts. The date can be easily corrected via the pusher with the McLaren logo located at 8 o’clock.
The crown design picks up on one of the controls inside the cockpit of the car. It is based on the Speedtail's drive mode selector and is a true engineering marvel made from a combination of Carbon TPT and titanium. The function selector push-piece at 4 o’clock makes it possible to select among the neutral, winding, and hand-setting functions with a simple push— rather like using a gear shift paddle.
The upper sapphire crystal is highly complex and costs 15 to 20 times as much as a ‘classic’ Richard Mille sapphire watch glass —already extremely expensive and complicated. The reason for this lies in the triple contour imposed by the particular shape of its bezel and its decreasing thickness. Grinding the sapphire’s three radii to measurements of plus or minus two-hundredths of a millimeter is incredibly difficult.
The design of the crystal alone required 18 months of work because they had to find a way to both grind the sapphire to the perfect shape and also seal it in order to guarantee water resistance to 50 meters. Sapphire is a very hard material, and it cannot be milled using, for example, the type of five-axis machine that might be used to create a bezel. The only way to work sapphire is by grinding, and we now have this knowledge in-house at Richard Mille, using stones that gradually erode the surface over a period of many hours in order to give the crystal this very precise geometry.
The entirely new automatic movement architecture demanded a remarkable 8,600 hours of development, much of which went into finalising the extreme level of detail. Grade 5 titanium has been used for key components such as the bridges, the bridge screws, the baseplate and the rotor core. The CRMT4 movement introduces a power reserve display as well as the oversized date and function selector complications, all of which are firsts at Richard Mille for an in-house tourbillon.
The wheels are machined with McLaren logo that adorns the bonnet of the Speedtail, while the domed parts usher in new surface profiles that were required to translate the car’s curves. The platinum and red gold winding rotor is inspired by the McLaren Speedtail’s bonnet and the barrel-setting by its roof line.
The design and execution of the watch demonstrate a holistic approach to the conception of the movement, case, and dial. As a result, everything has been constructed according to extremely rigorous specifications. For example, a casing ring is no longer used, and the movement is mounted on chassis mounting rubbers —ISO SW— fixed by titanium screws. The movement provides a power reserve of 50 hours when fully wound.
“The complexity of the components, the multitude of details and, above all, the attention applied to the finishing place the RM 40-01 firmly at the peak of Swiss-made watches. The rims, for example, are buff-polished and the progressive angles - among other elements - and the bevellings are gradual hand-polished.” Salvador Arbona, Movement Technical Director.
The new Richard Mille RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail is available in a limited edition of 106 pieces.
Sticker Price $1,022,000 USD. For more info on Richard Mille click here.
