Bold & Beautiful: Richard Mille’s New RM 65-01 Automatic Split Seconds Chronograph

One hallmark of Richard Mille is that he always likes to explore the boundaries of watchmaking and preferably push them a little bit further back. With the new RM 65-01, he did just that again. With over 600 components, is this one of the most complicated watches the brand has made to date. This is mainly thanks to the split-second chronograph, for which Mille reinvented the complication.

It took a total of five years of development for the RM 65-01 to come to life. Many of them were invested in developing the movement, but a great deal of time was also spent in ensuring that the watch was suitable for everyday wear. While rare, precious, and expensive, do many Richard Mille owners not turn their watches into ‘safe queens,’ but actually wear them. Available with a Carbon TPT®, or gold with Carbon TPT® case, is the RM 65-01 most certainly up for that. While its bold colors make it a natural eye-catcher, they all serve a purpose. Mille used color-coding so that owners can quickly identify which pusher activates a specific function of the watch. Yellow indicates the time, and orange the chronograph display, while blue is for the split-second function. Further does green refers to the date-display and red to the winding mechanism.

While the watch is fitted with an automatic movement, you can also wind it by hand. This can be done by turning the crown, but the RM 65-01 also has an innovative rapid winding mechanism. By pressing the pusher at 8 o’clock, the watch can quickly be charged up to its 60-hour power reserve. This is not the only innovation in the watch, as Mille uses no less than 6 column wheels for the chronograph, in combination with vertical coupling. Running at 36,000 VpH/5Hz, the watch is capable of measuring elapsed time with a precision of 1/10th of a second. Thanks to its innovative movement architecture, the chronograph starts and stops with the utmost precision under the most demanding circumstances, just as a Richard Mille should.