Richard Mille x McLaren Automotive 40-01 Speedtail

As luxury supercar maker McLaren Automotive and Richard Mille enter the fifth year of their ongoing partnership, they reveal their latest and most ambitious collaboration to date – the RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail. As the name suggests, this remarkable and unique watch honors the fastest, most advanced and most exotic road car McLaren has yet produced – the futuristic looking Speedtail.

Based on the form of a teardrop, the most aerodynamically efficient shape found in nature, the Speedtail is the apotheosis of the streamlined hypercar, a three-seat hyper grand tourer that became the third car in McLaren’s Ultimate line-up. With its 1,070-horsepower hybrid powertrain, the Speedtail covers 112 meters per second when travelling at its top speed of 250mph, making it the fastest McLaren road car to date.

It took Richard Mille’s casing department, led by Technical Director Julien Boillat, an unprecedented 2,800 hours over 18 months to perfect the lines.

Like the Speedtail on which its based, the watch’s lines mimic the form of a water droplet while bezel indentations evoke the bonnet openings, and pushers that recall the air outlets behind the front wheels.

Due to the unprecedented complexity of the design, five prototypes were created before the optimum shape was achieved. The challenge lay in the fact that the case is significantly wider at 12 o’clock than at 6 o’clock, with a further taper between the titanium bezel and case back, which are separated by a caseband made from Carbon TPT® and unequal length titanium pillars.

The strap is also a unique design, being asymmetrical and with the rubber version using Vulculor® technology from Biwi SA, a special process that enables colored rubber to be over-molded – so allowing the iconic McLaren orange accent colored stripe seen at 6 o’clock on the movement to extend to the wrist.

Despite the extraordinary anatomy of the case, Salvador Arbona, Richard Mille’s Technical Director, Movement, created a horological ‘engine’ that seamlessly occupies all the available space and introduces a level of mechanical sophistication that makes the RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon an appropriately extraordinary companion to the Speedtail.

Grade 5 titanium has been used for key components such as the bridges, the bridge screws, the baseplate and the rotor core. The CRMT4 movement that drives the RM 40-01 introduces the mechanism’s first power reserve display as well as the oversize date and function selector complications, all of which are firsts at Richard Mille for an in-house tourbillon.

In the pursuit of perfection, three power reserve systems were developed before the definitive version was arrived at which is integrated into the watch. The entirely new movement architecture demanded a remarkable 8,600 hours of development, much of which went into finalizing the extreme level of detail.

To reflect the 106 McLaren Speedtails manufactured, 106 RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail watches are planned.

Guide Price: CHF 900,000 excluding taxes