Grade 1 Replica Watches Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events


Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

At the mention of Richard Mille, classic cars don’t exactly spring to mind. The watches are all about advancement through the use of the best materials, so why would they be the driving force behind an event meant to celebrate the elegance of vintage machines? After all, these are watches that demand attention, the case size alone means it’s going to turn heads, not to mention the colorful and intricate faces. They stand juxtaposed to the wonderfully simplistic styling and quiet luxury of a classic car, so where is the common ground?

That’s one of the many questions I had for Richard Mille the man, about Richard Mille the brand, while we chatted on a balcony overlooking the 3rd Annual Chantilly Arts & Elegance in Chantilly, France.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

With the average transaction price of a Richard Mille watch being $180,000 and a line featuring pieces that go for over a million dollars, one could assume that it is simply a convergence of tastes. People who can afford a Richard Mille watch can afford to collect vintage automobiles, but do they? I can’t definitively say if that’s the case, but I was pleased to find that there’s much more to Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille than simply “celebrating wealth.”

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

While the watch line is comprised of seriously intricate pieces that incorporate technology and design elements from modern race cars, Richard himself prefers the classics when it comes to automobiles. His interest in them goes all the way back to when he was very young, closely following Formula 1 and building scale models.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

“Timeless and classic” aren’t terms you would generally hear from anybody talking about Richard Mille goods — notably people at the company itself. Inspired by the doctrine of a total focus on the performance-over-cost mindset borrowed from other industries like the world of Formula 1 racing, Richard Mille goods are all about pushing the envelope of possibility.Depending on which you ask, that push by Richard Mille seems to be equally in regions of technical mechanics, design, marketing strategy, and needless to say, pricing. Let’s return to this specific limited edition of 150 pieces RM 11-03, which again sees Richard Mille paying homage to Mr. Jean Todt of racing, Ferrari, and Formula 1 fame. The particular goal of this watch is on the thinner side, being directly attributed to celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jean Todt’s “career.” More especially, like lots of other luxury watches, this particular item is, in actuality, a true celebration trophy for Mr. Todt, his friends, and lovers (I wrote here why watches make the best trophies).The celebration is indeed for Mr. Todt (and Richard Mille) as opposed to the buyers themselves, but it’s a tacit reminder by Richard Mille for its consumers that “you ought to make or buy a watch once you too have such a celebration to understand.” It is well established in the luxury world that customers (no matter their budget degree) are the most inspired to buy something like watch when they’re seeking to commemorate something.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

A true automotive enthusiast, he finds cars in museums to be “a bit sad” and believes that cars are “living objects” meant to be shared with the public and driven, no matter their provenance. True to his word, Richard told me that he was bound for Spain in a few days to drive some of his cars on a track, including a 1970s McLaren F1 car.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

This led me to believe that Richard is a man who just gets it when it comes to cars and car culture. He is not just another wealthy individual amassing a collection to serve his ego, but rather to honor the engineers who worked tirelessly to push the boundaries of technology in their respective eras. A fascination with the mechanics of race cars is very apparent in Richard Mille watches, especially the new RM 11-03 that was launched that weekend. The crown was inspired by competition wheels, and ribbed pushers are styled after pedals, protected by NTPT carbon, which is widely used in Formula 1. Having delved into where that fascination comes from with Richard himself, the watches make a whole lot more sense.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

This noted, I can still appreciate it for what I mentioned previously: to get this type of detail in this quantity, you either go for a near six-figure watch or you will miss out. Having visited so many manufactures and managed so many costly watches, it is mind-numbingly complex and difficult-to-make details such as this that are what really make a watch stick out from the remainder. And if there is anything that I really do enjoy at a Richard Mille watch, it’s that you can kind of get lost in it and hope to detect such facts even weeks after sporting the watch.And I’m sorry, but a traditional watch with a conventional exterior must possess one absolutely amazing movement to justify a similar six-figure price — and again, lots of collectors who now are purchasing (and sporting) Richard Milles do so because a new dial onto a 5270 often just is not exciting enough when on additional watches everywhere you look, you see detailing which will never be current on proudly traditional watches. Before you light your torches and pull out your pitchforks, I am not saying you is superior to the other, or one shouldn’t exist and the other needs to, but instead that past the show-off element, there is another reason why Richard Mille watches (and other people, such as an MB&F Legacy Machine Perpetual or Urwerk UR-110, et cetera) do so well at a time while others struggle.What leaves space for criticism concerning the situation itself is the fact that 18k white gold scratches if you look at it the wrong way — things tougher than white gold comprise melting icehockey, or even the Queen’s royal choice of feather pillows. The ceramic alternative won’t be that much better, but will certainly offer you an improvement in this aspect, at a cost of lost sheen that just precious metals can create. Water resistance, regardless of the double-O ring crown is rated for 30m. I keep saying all contemporary watches should have at least 100m depth score, even though the way things are moving, 30-50m seems to become the norm among non-dive watches.
Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

The overall message I took away from the conversation was this: if high-performance automotive technology is continually advancing to improve performance, then the same should be true of watches. To Richard, there is no reason to “make replicas,” which is what he believes many other watch manufacturers are doing by producing the same watches, with the same movements that they’ve been making for years. Instead, he thinks it’s important to “push boundaries, create something fresh, something new,” and that’s what Richard did with the RM 011 in 2007.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Now, that watch has evolved into the RM 11-03, much like the 911 has been evolving since the ’60s. Like the famous German sports car, the Swiss sports watch doesn’t leave the design of the original behind, but rather improves on it, specifically by adding stepped columns on the caseband and bezels that increase overall stiffness and durability. A totally new rotor design and increased bridge skeletonization are visible through the back of the case – and man, is it something to lay one’s eyes on. For a lover of movements, studying the new grade 5 titanium and white gold variable geometry rotor must be akin to me peering through the rear windscreen of a Ferrari F40.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

When our conversation concluded, it was time to admire priceless vehicle after priceless vehicle, and while doing so I thought about the similarities between the automotive community and the horological community. In the upper echelons of each, you have contemporary products that vastly out-perform those of the past. However, it’s not always ultimate performance that people are looking for. In fact, quite often the attraction to a watch or a car is purely an aesthetic one, and the internal workings are given little to no consideration.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

I’m often guilty of this kind of thinking myself, but lately I’ve become more intent on better understanding what separates a watch like RM 11-03 from other brands in the way that a car like the 1939 BMW 328 Kamm Racing Limousine was ahead of virtually everything else of the era. The easy answer would be the details, and specifically the level of attention to them.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

The RM 11-03 is the natural evolution of an astounding design that took hold 9 years ago with the RM 011, and is without a doubt the most insane watch I’ve every had the good fortune to put on my wrist. It looks like it should weigh a ton, but it’s actually quite light, and because of the curved casing, it sits quite comfortably on the arm. It’s a watch that’s difficult to take your eyes off of because of the intricate details, but one that’s easily appreciated even if you don’t understand the inner workings of an automatic flyback chronograph, or the point of having a crown made from grade 5 titanium.

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

Chantilly Arts & Elegance Event With Richard Mille Watches Shows & Events

The same goes for the ’39 BMW 328 Kamm Racing Limousine, which was one of my favorite cars at the show. It’s visually arresting, but the development that led to its appearance is equally important as the look itself. Working closely with Professor Wunibal Kamm, a pioneer in aerodynamic design, BMW developed a body with a streamlined shape based on the BMW 328 sports car.