An Exceptional Ultra-Flat Timepiece

Richard Mille celebrates their relationship with Ferrari with the creation of an exceptional ultra-flat timepiece, the RM UP-01 Ferrari. — Photos: Richard Mille

Richard Mille’s obsession with excellence, precision, reliability and innovation has led to the creation of sporting mechanisms that are as elegant as they are immediately recognisable.

Sharing this common goal of uncompromising performance is Ferrari, the renowned automotive brand which has been designing legendary sports cars since 1947.

Ferrari and Richard Mille joined forces in 2021 via a multi-year partnership that includes Formula 1, WEC endurance, GT racing and e-sport, united in their pursuit of top performance.

The two manufacturers are engaged in the same passionate quest for excellence in their respective domains, sportscars and contemporary haute horlogerie respectively, two distinct realms with much common ground.

In addition to the 3,600 hours of development required for the movement, 2,400 hours were required for functional design and 2,000 hours of labour on the casing.

Richard Mille celebrates this budding relationship with the creation of an exceptional ultra-flat timepiece, the RM UP-01 Ferrari.

Quest for excellence

Driven by their shared pursuit of perfection, Ferrari and Richard Mille joined forces to create a long-term partnership in 2021.

One of the most emblematic automotive brands in the world, Ferrari’s sportscars have triumphed in the most famous races of all time, from the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Targa Florio and Mille Miglia to the Monaco Grand Prix.

The La Scuderia Ferrari racing team boasts no less than 15 driver’s championship titles and 16 constructor world championship trophies, victories which have allowed the minds behind the Prancing Horse to imagine the world’s finest supercars.

Richard Mille engineers have in common with Ferrari an obsession with innovating to the extreme, a head-stone from which new standards and records flow.

The RM UP-01 Ferrari successfully respects the principles of the manufacture. Seen here is the front of the watch.

Since 2001, at Les Breuleux in the Swiss Jura, Richard Mille has been designing watches with strong personalities and unheard-of levels of technicity.

These symbols of modernity and performance are developed with no regard for limits, whether in terms of complexity or investment in R&D.

Breaking the rules

To celebrate this relationship, Richard Mille introduced an exceptional ultra-flat timepiece, the RM UP-01 Ferrari, a design which breaks from the brand’s established stylistic codes, but remains faithful to its identity and spirit.

Once again rolling back the limits of what is possible, the brand took up the ultra-flat challenge – at just 1.75 mm thick, the RM UP-01 Ferrari constitutes a triumph of technical prowess.

A model resulting from many years’ work, dozens of prototypes and more than 6,000 hours of development and laboratory testing, the timepiece exemplifies a new approach to watch mechanics in which technicity more than ever dictates aesthetics.

Richard Mille 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.

“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,” explained Richard Mille 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 millimetres of depth was an extremely demanding and lengthy process.”

The RM UP-01 Ferrari 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.

Meeting the challenge of an ultra-flat watch precluded a traditional movement with superimposed gears and hands.

Richard Mille therefore opted to distribute what could not be stacked over a broader surface area by creating a perfect symbiosis between the movement and case, each ensuring the necessary rigidity of the other.

The ultra-flat watch at just 1.75 mm thick.

The RM UP-01 manual-winding movement with hours, minutes and function selector – capable of withstanding accelerations of more than 5,000 g’s – thus boasts a thickness of 1.18 mm, a weight of 2.82 grams, and a power reserve of 45 hours.

To ensure optimal functioning of the going train, the baseplate and skeletonised bridges are crafted of grade 5 titanium, guaranteeing perfect flatness without compromising strength.

The patented extra flat barrel is fitted with an extraordinarily fine hairspring and the architecture of the escapement was entirely redesigned. To reduce depth, the small plate of the 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 of the regulating organ.

The manual-winding movement with hours, minutes and function selector presents a profile of just 1.18 mm and weighs in at 2.82 grams.

To deliver a watch this thin, it was also necessary to rethink the winding mechanism and to eliminate the winding stem, whose minimum diameter of 1.5 mm 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,” said Richard Mille technical director for movements, Salvador Arbona.

As a material for the case – just 1.75 mm in thickness and water resistant to 10 metres – titanium was chosen for the advantages it offers in combining lightness and laboratory tested resistance.

The two sapphire crystals, one over the time indicators whose hands are directly affixed to the wheels, the other positioned over the regulator (balance wheel-spring assembly) to showcase the movement’s operation, were also reduced in thickness to two tenths of a millimetre with a diameter calculated to ensure their resistance during testing phases.

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.

This made the decision to produce and machine the case in-house in the brand’s movement department a logical step to take for the RM UP-01 Ferrari.

Thanks to its extreme lightness, tonneau shape, spline screws, skeletonised bridges and level of finishing, the 150 limited-edition timepieces in the RM UP-01 Ferrari series are consistent with the standards of the Richard Mille manufacture.

Combining innovation with performance, strength and aesthetics, like the prestigious Italian automotive legend, the watch is a work of surpassing prowess that meets Richard Mille’s every expectation, ready to be worn under any circumstances.