Richard Mille Watches

There’s not a whole lot that watchmaking has to throw at us that we would be surprised by these days. Tudor’s P01, for example, that was close—but it really was only a matter of time before that unusual prototype was dusted off and wheeled out. What with whole watches being made from sapphire and dials with spiders in them, it’s come to the point where we’ve seen practically everything—and that makes the secrets of the three chronographs we’ve got coming up all the more surprising.

Whether you like Richard Mille or not—and it’s a hotly contested topic—you have to at least acknowledge that the avant-garde brand does things a little differently. Since the release of the 2001 RM001, Richard Mille has chosen to define the watches it makes by going down a different route to traditional Swiss watchmaking—and here are five things that particularly stand out.

If you decided to build a watch, a really good one with some kind of complication, where every last piece—up to and including the smallest screw—was custom-made just for it, how much would it cost? Thousands? Tens of thousands? It’s hard to say at a guess, but this much is true: the Richard Mille RM011, a flyback chronograph in rose gold, costs £100,000. Let’s find out why.

Richard Mille is no stranger to breaking records, and the latest watch by the brand to do so is the RM 50-03 McLaren F1; this highly complicated split second tourbillon watch weighs just 38 grams in total, including the strap. To put that in perspective, the entire timepiece weighs less than a golf ball. Considering what’s going on inside the watch, that’s a pretty impressive statistic.