Richard Mille is off to the races with the unveiling of its latest RM 60-01 Regatta Flyback Chronograph ($161,000). The new sailing watch celebrates the 9th edition of Les Voiles de St. Barth Regatta, of which the Swiss watchmaker has been the title sponsor since 2010. Despite the devastation wreaked on the island of Saint Barth by Hurricane Irma last year, the races have already set sail this past Sunday, April 8, and will run through Saturday, April 14. Each year, the RM timepiece is updated in a new colorway and presented to the winner of the overall best performance in the Maxi class races. For the last 2 years, George Sakellaris—the chairman, president, and CEO of energy services company Ameresco—of team Proteus has taken home the six-figure RM 60-01. Prior to Sakellaris’s win, former United Technologies chairman George David took home the top Richard Mille prize 4 years in a row with his team aboard the Rambler. This year, the prized lightweight grade 5 titanium timepiece comes in a spruced-up vivid yellow and features sky-blue hour and minute hands for better visibility at sea.
Despite its light weight, the RM 60-01 is a lot of watch at 50 mm and comes with a serious array of complications and navigational features meant for maintaining the course at sea. The timepiece features a flyback chronograph, an annual calendar with oversize date, and a running seconds and UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) function. The flyback chronograph ensures that the wearer does not have to stop the mechanism in order to reset it—the rest pusher snaps it back to zero for instant timing of another interval. The RM 60-01 features quick-locking chronograph pushers and a releasing mechanism activated by a turn of the secondary crown to prevent accidental changes to the chronograph display. The UTC hand is marked by the long yellow hand with an arrow tip and can be adjusted via a pusher. Sailors can use the hand to position it with the sun (assuming that weather conditions are ideal), and then the bezel is used to align the UTC hand with the local time on the circumference of the bezel—a white-numbered scale is used for the Northern Hemisphere, and a yellow-numbered scale is used for the Southern Hemisphere. Once it is set, the compass headings marked in white on the bezel will align with the direction on the earth’s surface. A 24-hour scale can set a second time zone when the timepiece is not being used for navigation at sea.
The RM 60-01 features the RMAC2 automatic caliber with a rotor that can be adjusted to the wearer’s activity level via six different positions. The timepiece is water resistant up to 100 meters (328 feet), has 50 hours of power reserve, and is limited to just 50 pieces in the Americas.
Comments