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LE MANS, FRANCE - For insight into Richard Mille's obsession with performance, look no further than his garage: his vast collection includes a Ferrari 512M, Porsche 917, Lola T70, and V16-powered BRM, and the Brittany-based watchmaker is not afraid to race his six and seven-figure toys.
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"I love cars, aircraft, and watches," he explains. "There are so many similarities."
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Richard Mille disdains watches with ornamental automotive themes like tire tread wristbands and steering spoke hands, and believes the idea that a watch should be weighty is an outdated conceit, in the same way that overweight cars are a thing of the past. Take, for instance, his RM 027 Tourbillon, the $590,000 wristwatch which was famously swiped (and recovered) from tennis star Rafael Nadal's hotel room. The automatic timepiece is the lightest mechanical watch on the planet, and incorporates carbon nanofiber construction and an aluminum lithium movement that weighs in at a mere 3.8 grams. Though it feels virtually weightless, the watch-- which was researched and developed using Nadal's wrist as a proving ground-- can withstand 800 Gs.
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While Mille uses athletes like Nadal and Ferrari F1 driver Felipe Massa to develop his prototypes, he's looking skyward for his next watch.?According to Mille, the?the?RM 039 Aviation E6-B Flyback?(seen above)?uses a bezel that can be used to calculate "fuel burn, flight times, ground speed, density altitude or wind correction," as well as unit conversions-- many of the variables managed by the E6-B circular sliderule invented by U.S. Naval?Lieutenant?Philip Dalton in the 1930s. Unlike the slide rule, the watch incorporates over 1,000 parts, some of which are so small they're invisible to the naked eye.
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If absolute accuracy is your only consideration, Mille admits that a five dollar quartz watch will outperform a?$2 million mechanical watch.?But for complex mechanical art you can wear on your wrist, these outrageously ambitious horological creations have a weird way of capturing?a gearhead's imagination.
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