Style Edit: How Richard Mille pushed watchmaking boundaries with the RM UP-01 Ferrari, even working with Audemars Piguet to shave the luxury timepiece down to 1.75mm – the world’s thinnest watch
For many years, watchmakers have tried to push their products towards ever greater thinness – a technical achievement that improves comfort on the wrist, and also makes them ideally suited to high performance environments like the fast moving world of motorsport. With the Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari, as you’d expect from the company that is reliably the No 1 innovator in the world of Swiss luxury watches, this is taken to a whole new level.
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The watch is an astonishing 1.75mm thick, making it pretty much a second skin for the wearer. Richard Mille has achieved this remarkable feat not by going down the obvious route of using the baseplate as the caseback. Instead, it integrates the movement and case, which means that there are no compromises where shock resistance is concerned.
To make the watch so thin, that movement also has to be a miracle of slimline miniaturisation. It measures just 1.18mm thick and weighs just 2.82 grams, but still packs quite a punch – featuring hours, minutes and a function selector, it comes with a power reserve of 45 hours and is capable of withstanding acceleration of more than 5,000Gs.
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The case is similarly a technical marvel. Made from titanium, a material that offers a perfect combination of extreme lightness and adamantine toughness, it offers water resistance down to 10 metres. It features two sapphire crystals, one over the time indicators and the other over the regulator, which are each just 2mm thick.
“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,” says Richard Mille’s technical director for cases Julien Boillat. “This is precisely what we did throughout our collaboration with the laboratories of Audemars Piguet Le Locle. Shaving off those last hundredths of millimetres of depth was an extremely demanding and lengthy process.”
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For this, the ultimate high performance watch, Richard Mille partnered with the ultimate experts in high performance: the most iconic of all carmakers, Ferrari. It’s the first watch to come out of the partnership between the most innovative of Swiss luxury watchmakers and the legendary high-end carmaker, which sees Richard Mille support Ferrari at every level of racing, from Formula One to its Driver Academy.
Unsurprisingly for such a pioneering timepiece, the development of the UP-01 Ferrari was a painstaking process, taking up more than 6,000 hours of development and laboratory testing time. It’s available in a limited edition of 150, making it as rare as it is extraordinary.
- The Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari took more than 6,000 hours to develop and test in the laboratory – all for a limited edition of only 150 pieces
- The Swiss luxury watchmaker supports Ferrari at all levels of racing, from Formula One racing to the legendary Italian high-end car maker’s Driver Academy