Richard Mille Unveils The World’s Thinnest Mechanical Watch: The RM UP-01

This week, Richard Mille broke the record by releasing the Richard Mille RM UP-01 Ferrari, a watch that has made its name as the world’s thinnest timepiece and first creation from Richard Mille’s long-term partnership with Ferrari. Measuring an astonishing 1.75 mm, the new timepiece is a technical feat for the brand and is limited to just 150 pieces.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Richard Mille

Remaining faithful to Richard Mille’s design DNA, the ultra-flat timepiece is both an embodiment of Richard Mille’s stylistic codes while also demonstrating a new technical approach to watch mechanics in which technicity dictates aesthetics. And this was no easy task. “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 wearer’s daily life, whatever the circumstances,” explains Salvador Arbona, the Technical Director for Movements at Richard Mille.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Richard Mille

The new watch is the result of dozens of prototypes and more than 6,000 hours of development and laboratory testing. “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,” explains Julien Boillat, the Technical Director for Cases at Richard Mille. “This is precisely what we did throughout our collaboration with the laboratories of Audemars Piguet Le Locle. Shaving off those last millimeters of depth was an extremely demanding and lengthy process.”

Synonymous with the Italian automotive legend – and on par with the standards of the Richard Mille manufacture with its extreme lightness, tonneau shape, spline screws, skeletonized bridges, and level of finishing – the RM UP-01 Ferrari series fuses innovation with performance, strength, and aesthetics. The RMUP-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 millimeters, a weight of 2.82 grams, and a power reserve of 45 hours. Varying design measures were also taken to ensure the optimal functioning of the timepiece. The patented extra flat barrel is fitted with an extraordinarily fine hairspring, and the baseplate and skeletonized bridges are crafted of grade 5 titanium, guaranteeing perfect flatness. Titanium was also used as the material for the case, with two sapphire crystals — one over the time indicators and the other positioned over the regulator.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Richard Mille

Suppose this is any indication of what is yet to come between the partnership — in that case, we’re suspecting more history to be made and boundaries to be broken in the world of high watchmaking.