Richard Mille Reveals A $1 Million Hyper Watch To Match Your McLaren Speedtail Hyper Car

McLaren’s partnership with Richard Mille has led to the watchmaker’s latest creation: the RM 40-01 Automatic Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail. But before you get too excited, learn that it’ll cost you a large fortune retailing for CHF 900,000, which comes to around €822,000 or US$997,000 excluding VAT at today’s rates.

So, a $1M hyper watch for a +$2.25M hyper car, or at least that’s what it cost when new before any options or personalization, because we’ve seen lightly used Speedtails selling for well over $3M lately.

Inspired by, you guessed it, the McLaren Speedtail, the watch carries the car’s teardrop aesthetic into its design. Richard Mille took inspiration from the hood openings in the indentations along the bezel, while the pushers are meant to evoke the air outlets behind the front wheels.

It also features a platinum and red gold winding rotor that is inspired by the Speedtail’s hood. The barrel-setting, meanwhile, takes its cues from the roofline and the downward curve of the mechanism that follows from 12 to 6 o’clock recalls the brushed metal divider between the car’s cockpit and bodywork.

An obvious homage to McLaren is the orange line running from the lower part of the movement onto the strap. Not only was the color selected to celebrate McLaren, but the shape is also meant to look like the Speedtail’s rear window.

“When it came to the RM 40-01, we had considerable input in sharing the highlights of the car and the philosophy behind it,” said Rob Melville, McLaren’s design director. “With the Speedtail, we set out to produce a car that had an artistic quality to it. That has certainly come through in the watch, which beautifully mirrors the many various details of the Speedtail in its finish, materials and its uncompromising design.”

If you’re wondering why this watch is being revealed today, more than a year after the first cars were delivered, well, watch design is (ironically) a time-consuming business. Richard Mille‘s casing department took an unprecedented 2,800 hours over the course of 18 months perfecting the lines of the watch.

“The watch has one of the highest levels of finishing ever executed at Richard Mille,” said Julien Boillat, Richard Mille‘s technical director. “The attention to detail is extreme, with mirror polished, plain and satinized effects in different areas and the combined use of titanium and Carbon TPT. The case itself is made from 69 individual parts.”

That complexity meant that it took the design team five prototypes before they got the shape just right. And to protect its state-of-the-art movement, the company had to design a unique upper crystal featuring a “triple contour” to allow for the taper and thickness of the bezel.

The watch also has a couple of firsts for Richard Mille. It’s the company’s first in-house tourbillon that has a power reserve display and an oversized date and function selector and it ended up taking the company 8,600 hours to develop.

Richard Mille will make just 106 of these watches, to match the 106 Speedtails McLaren plans to build.