Style Edit: How Richard Mille pushed watchmaking boundaries with the RM UP-01 Ferrari, even working with Audemars Piguet to shave the luxury timepiece down to 1.75mm – the world’s thinnest watch

Nov 24 , 2023

The Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari breaks new ground in design and manufacture. Photo: Handout

The Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari took more than 6,000 hours to develop and test in the laboratory – all for a limited edition of only 150 pieces

The Swiss luxury watchmaker supports Ferrari at all levels of racing, from Formula One racing to the legendary Italian high-end car maker’s Driver Academy

There are groundbreaking watches, and then there is the Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari, one of the most groundbreaking of them all and the thinnest ever made. There is no tinkering around the edges with a slightly different shaped case or a lightly redesigned dial here: instead, what we have is a complete reimagining of what a watch looks like, housed in a package that expands the possibilities of what the dimensions of a luxury timepiece can be.

Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari. Photo: Handout

For many years, watchmakers have tried to push their products towards ever greater thinness – a technical achievement that improves comfort on the wrist, and also makes them ideally suited to high performance environments like the fast moving world of motorsport. With the Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari, as you’d expect from the company that is reliably the No 1 innovator in the world of Swiss luxury watches, this is taken to a whole new level.

The watch is an astonishing 1.75mm thick, making it pretty much a second skin for the wearer. Richard Mille has achieved this remarkable feat not by going down the obvious route of using the baseplate as the caseback. Instead, it integrates the movement and case, which means that there are no compromises where shock resistance is concerned.

Inside the Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari. Photo: Handout

To make the watch so thin, that movement also has to be a miracle of slimline miniaturisation. It measures just 1.18mm thick and weighs just 2.82 grams, but still packs quite a punch – featuring hours, minutes and a function selector, it comes with a power reserve of 45 hours and is capable of withstanding acceleration of more than 5,000Gs.

The case is similarly a technical marvel. Made from titanium, a material that offers a perfect combination of extreme lightness and adamantine toughness, it offers water resistance down to 10 metres. It features two sapphire crystals, one over the time indicators and the other over the regulator, which are each just 2mm thick.

The Richard Mille UP-01 Ferrari took 6,000 hours to develop and test. Photo: Handout

“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,” says Richard Mille’s technical director for cases Julien Boillat. “This is precisely what we did throughout our collaboration with the laboratories of Audemars Piguet Le Locle. Shaving off those last hundredths of millimetres of depth was an extremely demanding and lengthy process.”

A Richard Mille x Ferrari shoot with Formula One driver Carlos Sainz. Photo: Rafael Heygster

For this, the ultimate high performance watch, Richard Mille partnered with the ultimate experts in high performance: the most iconic of all carmakers, Ferrari. It’s the first watch to come out of the partnership between the most innovative of Swiss luxury watchmakers and the legendary high-end carmaker, which sees Richard Mille support Ferrari at every level of racing, from Formula One to its Driver Academy.