Podium Finish

Aaron de Silva chronicles a decade-long collaboration between watchmaker Richard Mille and Formula One driver Felipe Massa that has birthed many notable timekeepers, including two striking anniversary models this year

n the blink of an eye, a decade has flown by since Richard Mille first tied up with Brazilian motorsports champ Felipe Massa. Richard Mille (the namesake founder) has a close bond with the motorsports world—being a racing enthusiast himself—and his watches often echo the hightech characteristics of speedsters by having ultra-lightweight chassis (cases) and highperformance engines (movements). His company has also aligned itself with top racers such as Romain Grosjean, Sébastien Loeb, and the late Jules Bianchi, who are or were all brand ambassadors, as well as motoring bigwigs like Jean Todt. But it’s with Massa that Mille has established the longest relationship. It was in 2004 when the Williams driver started wearing the test watches, before he strapped the RM006 to his wrist while competing in the 2005 Canadian Grand Prix. This was the year the two officialised their partnership and Massa was named a Richard Mille ambassador. He has since become the brand’s official test driver for its Massa-branded timepieces. Nine watches have been released in the past 10 years, including two anniversary models this year, special editions of the RM056 and RM011. Of these nine, some have brought significant technical advancements to the table. The RM004 from 2009 for instance, was the brand’s first split-seconds chronograph, an extremely complex complication that took five years to engineer. The RM009 from 2006 introduced the world’s first case made from Alusic, an alloy of aluminium, silicon and carbon. And the RM056 from 2012 broke ground as the world’s first watch to have a case fashioned entirely from sapphire crystal. This remarkable feat of engineering is reprised in the anniversary RM056 model, which is limited to 10 pieces. Synthetic sapphire is second in hardness only to diamond, so one can imagine the degree of difficulty in machining an entire case from the material. The procedure takes around 1,000 hours of work per case, with 430 of those hours needed just to file the surfaces and another 350 just to polish them. Little wonder that Mille is one of the few—if not the only—watchmakers that bother to carry out this exercise. Mind you, it’s no vanity project; the crystal’s inherent hardness confers an extraordinary durability and resistance to wear and tear. The movement—a split-seconds chronograph with tourbillon regulator suspended within the case via a system of cables and pulleys—remains the same as in the 2012 version, with a completely transparent case. What has changed are some elements on the dial. New accent colours, blue and yellow, have been added, to reflect Massa’s Williams F1 helmet colours (the previous RM056 had more red tones, when Massa was signed with Ferrari). Moreover, his personal logo now appears between 12 and 1 o’clock. These aesthetic changes are also apparent on the new RM011, which boasts a blue-and-yellow scheme on the dial, crown and chronograph push-pieces. Eagle-eyed enthusiasts will notice that Massa’s logo is artfully incorporated into the numeral “12”. Movement-wise, the flyback chronograph calibre with an annual calendar from the original RM011 reprises its role. The biggest change comes in the case material. Previously in titanium, the new case is hewn from NTPT Carbon, a material proprietary to the watchmaker. As a final flourish, Massa’s signature is engraved on the caseback. Only 100 of these beauts have been released, making them eminently covetable collectables.