McLaren Automotive and Richard Mille revealed their latest collaboration – the RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail. It’s a Limited edition of 106 timepieces to match the exclusivity of the 106 Speedtail hypercars built by McLaren Automotive.
The limited edition timepiece features first use of in-house developed power reserve indicator, large oversize date and function selectors on the Richard Mille automatic in-house tourbillon. It took Richard Mille’s casing department, led by Technical Director Julien Boillat, an unprecedented 2,800 hours over 18 months to perfect the lines. Like the Speedtail on which its based, the watch’s lines mimic the form of a water droplet while bezel indentations evoke the bonnet openings, and pushers that recall the air outlets behind the front wheels.
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, with a further taper between the titanium bezel and case back, which are separated by a caseband made from Carbon TPT® and unequal length titanium pillars.
To protect the RM 40-01’s state-of-the-art movement, Richard Mille developed a unique upper crystal featuring a ‘triple contour’ to account for the decreasing taper and thickness of the bezel. It alone took 18 months.
The strap is also a unique design, being asymmetrical and with the rubber version using Vulculor® technology from Biwi SA, a special process that enables colored rubber to be over-molded – so allowing the iconic McLaren orange accent colored stripe seen at 6 o’clock on the movement to extend to the wrist.
Despite the extraordinary anatomy of the case, Salvador Arbona, Richard Mille’s Technical Director, Movement, created a horological ‘engine’ that seamlessly occupies all the available space and introduces a level of mechanical sophistication that makes the RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon an appropriately extraordinary companion to the Speedtail.
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 that drives the RM 40-01 introduces the mechanism’s first power reserve display as well as the oversize date and function selector complications, all of which are firsts at Richard Mille for an in-house tourbillon.
The entirely new movement architecture demanded a remarkable 8,600 hours of development, much of which went into finalizing the extreme level of detail.
The complexity of the components, the multitude of details and, above all, the attention applied to the finishes 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 bevelings are Gradual hand-polished. And in order to preserve the overall balance of the watch and its sleekness of line, the date corrector was positioned at 8 o’clock – a far more technically complex.
The platinum and red gold winding rotor is inspired by the Speedtail’s bonnet and the barrel-setting by its roof line. The gentle, downward curve that the mechanism follows from 12 o’clock to 6 o’clock recalls the brushed metal divider between the car’s cockpit and its bodywork, a demarcation McLaren was inspired to incorporate because of the design of previous Richard Mille watches, while the orange line running from the lower part of the movement and on to the strap mimics the vertical stoplight mounted in the Speedtail’s rear screen.