Richard Mille’s New McLaren Watch Has a ‘Jump Start’ Button

October 11, 2024:

Such is the world of luxury products, that customers for McLaren Automotive’s newly announced $2.6 million W1 hypercar can now order a watch to match.

The fourth watch produced as a result of the long-term partnership between McLaren and luxury watchmaker Richard Mille, the RM 65-01 “McLaren W1 Edition” was announced this week in a press conference at the carmaker’s Woking headquarters.

Billed as something approaching a hypercar for the wrist, the watch, which will cost 320,000 Swiss francs plus taxes ($373,300) is a tribute to the design language of the car, which was revealed to the world last Sunday. With a split-second chronograph movement and a couple of other tricks up its sleeve, it houses what Richard Mille says is the most complicated automatic movement it has ever produced.

The movement, which comprises 480 components, beats at a frequency of 5 Hz, enabling measurement of intervals to the nearest tenth of a second. The split-seconds function allows the wearer to time two concurrent events, so you’ll know with pinpoint accuracy just how much faster you are than just about every other car on the road (or racetrack.) The pushers at 2, 4, and 10 o’clock, shaped to mimic the W1’s exhausts, control the chronograph, with their roles spelled out in McLaren’s “papaya orange” and a high-contrast shade of baby blue, but it’s the fourth pusher in pure orange that will catch your eye.

Start Me Up

This controls a very different function, unique to the RM 65 line. You could call it a “jump start” button—something hopefully the W1 will never require. It’s an instant winding mechanism, designed so that in the rare occurrence that the watch runs out of power, you can fire it up again with a few presses of your thumb.

It activates a rack-and-pinion mechanism that winds the mainspring without taking the watch off your wrist. Richard Mille says that 125 pushes would fully wind the watch, but it’s intended to provide a quick boost rather than be a substitute for the automatic winding system—which itself is highly complex, with a variable rotor that can be adjusted to suit the lifestyle of the wearer, according to the brand. Essentially, if you’re an active sort it’ll be set up to deliver less energy per rotation, and vice versa if you’re more sedentary.

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