Hands-on with the Richard Mille RM 65-01 Chronograph McLaren W1

Ultra-luxury watchmaker Richard Mille has just revealed its latest timepiece – and it’s inspired by the newest, fastest and most powerful McLaren supercar of all time.

I brought you news of the new McLaren W1 just a day ago – the 1,300-horsepower hybrid hypercar that costs from £2m and is already sold out – and now we’ve been hands-on with the perfect watch to accompany it.

It comes from McLaren partner Richard Mille and it’s called the RM 65-01 Automatic Split-Seconds Chronograph McLaren W1. Quite the mouthful, I know. The RM 65-01, to use a handy abbreviation, is inspired in several ways by the McLaren W1. In fact, the Richard Mille design team saw an early clay model of the W1 a full two years ago, back in 2022.

They’ve since used that time to build a watch with a bezel shaped to look like the car when viewed from above. The watch also features push-buttons shaped like the W1’s exhaust tips, and a gear-like crown with the McLaren logo at its centre. Like the car, the watch is built using titanium and carbon fibre, and majors on lightweight performance.

The watch is driven by Richard Mille’s own RMAC4 automatic chronograph movement, which has 51 jewels, 60 hours of power reserve, operates at 5 Hz, and can be viewed both through the skeletal dial and sapphire crystal exhibition case back. The split seconds function lets owners time laps of a racetrack, for example, to an accuracy of one tenth of a second. As well as being topped up by the movement of the wearer’s wrist, the watch features a ‘rapid winding’ system, where repeated pushes of the orange button fire energy into the mainspring.

Richard Mille says the bezel upper is just five tenths of a millimetre thick at its thinnest point, making it the thinnest bezel the company has ever produced. It also developed a new skeletonised titanium dial design for the RM 65-01, based on the pattern of the McLaren W1’s wheels.

The lower-right corner of the dial houses what’s known as a function selector. This operates in a similar way to the transmission of a semi-automatic supercar, and gives the wearer the ability to cycle through W, D and H for the watch’s winding, date and hand-setting modes, with the press of a button on the crown.

Even the rubber strap is McLaren themed, thanks to its optional Papaya Orange colour, but also with its patterns that are designed to reflect the aerodynamic foils and ducts of the W1’s engine cover and ground-effect spoilers.

The dial features hour and minute hands, of course, along with sub dials for seconds at the six o’clock position, then a 30-minute counter on the right and a 12-hour counter on the left. Lastly, there’s a date window at the 11 o’clock position.

Wearing the Richard Mille RM 65-01 McLaren W1

Right after its global reveal, I was invited to try out the watch for myself. I’m familiar with a broad range of timepieces, but never have I handled a watch with a six-figure price tag, let alone been allowed to try it on.

My initial thought was how, despite looking enormous in Richard Mille’s marketing images, the watch feels surprisingly compact in the hand and on the wrist.

The case measures 43.8 x 49.9 x 16.2 mm, so it certainly isn’t small. But the subtle curve to both the front and rear make it seem more petite than it really is. This illusion is also aided by the extremely lightweight materials – like carbon fibre and grade five titanium – used extensively throughout the watch, along with the simple, integrated rubber strap.

Despite having relatively small wrists and preferring watches no larger than 40 or 42 mm, I felt I could wear the RM 65-01 without it looking or feeling out of place – if I were a billionaire, at least, because Richard Mille watches certainly do not come cheap.

This model is priced at CHF 320,000 plus tax, which is about £343,500, or £60,000 more than the average UK house price. It’s undoubtedly a statement watch, as we’ve come to expect from Richard Mille, but when specified with the black strap of the example I tried on, it’s not as in-your-face as I feared it might be. That’s perhaps a role for the orange strap instead.

Richard Mille plans to produce 500 examples of this watch. The first 399 will be offered to buyers of the sold-out McLaren W1, with the rest then available to Richard Mille customers through its boutiques. This is a slightly different approach to previous Richard Mille x McLaren collaborations, where the production numbers of the watch and car were equal.

For example, just 106 of the RM 40-01 were made, since it was produced to partner with the equally rare McLaren Speedtail. The watch company said at today’s launch event how its customers who wanted the watch, but not necessarily the car, were frustrated by this arrangement, hence there being 399 McLaren W1s but 500 companion watches.

Interestingly, the new watch carries McLaren branding but does not prominently mention the W1 itself, other than in its name. By comparison, the RM 40-01 had “Speedtail” written across its bezel. I imagine this change will help the watch appeal to RM fans who haven't got an W1 on order.