Why Richard Mille wants Rafael Nadal to break their high-end watches

Rafael Nadal has broken several Richard Mille watches – and that’s exactly what the high-end brand’s founder wanted.

When the tennis star began collaborating with the brand nine years ago, he was asked to wear prototypes of the RM 27 tourbillon watch while training. Several watches were damaged in the process – unsurprising to those familiar with Nadal’s quick and aggressive style.

But for Mille, such extreme real-life testing offers the perfect opportunity to strengthen the brand’s high-performance watches and make them uniquely suited to various sports.

Wearing the RM 67-02, South African sprinter Wayde Van Niekerk celebrates winning the 400m sprint at the IAAF championships in August.

This is no common occurrence. Whether it’s the added weight of a timepiece on the wrist, or the fact that luxury watches are usually worn with care rather than bashed around in a sporting arena, many athletes with watch sponsors strap on their timepieces only after the hard work is done.

Which is why Richard Mille’s sports partnerships tend to get plenty of ink: Whether they are tennis pros or track-and-field stars, the brand’s ambassadors must wear their watches while engaged in their sport of choice.

And we must say, seeing Nadal execute powerful strokes or taking spills on the court while sporting a wristwatch with a six-digit price tag and equipped with a tourbillon – a typically fragile high-horology mechanism – is a pretty powerful marketing exercise.

Here, we delve into some of Richard Mille’s most notable high-performance timepieces, and how they have been built to stand up to the stresses of specific sports.

Swipe or click left/right to browse through the sports stars.

IN TENNIS: Rafael Nadal, Alexander Zverev
With serves that can exceed 200kmh, Spanish tennis ace Rafael Nadal (pictured) – who most recently bagged his 16th Grand Slam at the 2017 US Open – is one hard-hitting player. Whether he’s on top or nursing an injury, he has always made headlines for his game, but, since 2010, plenty of incredulous ink has also been devoted to the fact that he wears tourbillon watches with six-digit price tags while playing.

This year, Richard Mille introduced the 7th timepiece specially designed in collaboration with Nadal, the RM 27-03. Among its chief distinctive qualities: its lightness, with a weight of 34g. That’s about seven pieces of paper. The bright red-and-yellow case of this watch (a nod to Spain’s national colours) is made from Quartz TPT – an ultra-light and tough material comprising tinted resin, and ultra-thin layers of silica fi laments angled at 45 degrees to each other. This incredible lightness, which characterises all the watches bearing Nadal’s name, is what convinced the tennis pro to agree, all those years ago, to wear Mille’s watches on the court.

Despite its weight (or lack thereof ), the RM 27-03 has record-breaking impact resistance. It can survive forces of up to 10,000g’s – a quality that keeps its tourbillon movement safe when Nadal executes one of his powerful double-handed backhand returns. This is partly made possible by the watch’s “unibody” construction that sees the baseplate double as a caseband, with the bezel and caseback directly mounted on the baseplate. According to Richard Mille, such shock-resistant features were made possible by “countless hours of testing, particularly ‘pendulum impact testing’, which simulates the linear acceleration that occurs due to sudden movements or shock to the wearer”. But we’d say the best tester is Nadal himself, who has apparently broken several costly prototypes while training. It’s just part of the brand’s ongoing quest to make ever lighter and stronger timepieces that can perform at the same high level as their namesake.
IN TRACK AND FIELD: Wayde van Niekerk, Mutaz Essa Barshim, Yohan Blake
When your body – not a racquet, a club or a vehicle – is your instrument, and milliseconds can make the difference between a gold and a silver, there’s no room for anything extraneous. That’s why the RM 67-02 timepieces for South African sprinter Wayde van Niekerk (pictured) and Qatari high jumper Mutaz Essa Barshim were designed to be “almost a second skin”. At the recent IAAF World Championships in London, van Niekerk and Barshim won gold in the 400m and the high jump, respectively – while sporting the watches emblazoned in each of their country’s colours.

A sport-ready version of Richard Mille’s RM 67-01 Automatic Extra Flat that was launched last year, the RM 67-02 has a relatively svelte height of 7.8mm and a barely there weight of 32g. The lightest of all Richard Mille automatics, the RM 67-02 is made from Quartz TPT and Carbon TPT. The latter high-tech material has a similar manufacturing process to Quartz TPT, except that it uses carbon fibres instead of silica.

And because an ultra-light watch is pointless if it comes on a too-loose or uncomfortable band, the strap used here is totally seamless. While there is no word on what this new (rather unsexily named) “comfort strap” is actually made of, it has elastic properties that allow it to conform comfortably to the wearer’s wrist, buckle not required.
IN FORMULA ONE: McLaren-Honda Team, Felipe Massa, Romain Grosjean
It’s an oft-repeated story that has become part of the high-performance, alpha-male mythos surrounding the Richard Mille brand, but it remains impressive even when you hear it for the nth time. In 2009, F1 star Felipe Massa was wearing the RM 006 tourbillon watch when he suffered a high-speed, near-fatal crash at the Hungarian Grand Prix – the watch emerged still keeping good time, apparently largely due to its sturdy movement baseplate, crafted from carbon nanofibres.

The brand’s latest partner in motorsports is the McLaren-Honda team, a planned 10-year collaboration that has already spawned its fi rst timekeeping marvel. Launched earlier this year and spotted on the wrist of team drivers such as Belgian Stoff el Vandoorne (pictured), the RM 50-03 McLaren F1 set a new record as the world’s lightest split-seconds chronograph, with a weight of 40g. Its subtly patterned case is made from an improved version of Carbon TPT that contains the new material Graph TPT or graphene, a nano-material six times lighter than steel but 200 times stronger.

Taking inspiration from the wishbone suspension structure of a McLaren-Honda F1 car, the movement of the RM 50-03 is supported by a transverse cage made from Carbon TPT. This cage is affi xed to the caseband directly, instead of being held in place by a casing ring – a feature we are told allows it to withstand shocks of up to 5,000g’s during testing.
IN POLO: Pablo MacDonough
When watch fans think of timepieces made for the sport of polo, the first model that comes to mind is probably the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, with its swivelling case that can be fl ipped upside-down to protect it from the travails of the sport: Think fl ying balls, swinging mallets and galloping horses weighing around 500kg each. In 2012, Richard Mille launched its own polo-ready timepiece: the RM 53 Pablo MacDonough, an avant-garde timepiece created in collaboration with the Argentinean polo star.

What the RM 53 and the Reverso do have in common are designs minimising the amount of visible watch face. While the latter was designed to be turned face-down during a match, the RM 53 feaures an armoured take on its signature curved tonneau case. Its case is made from titanium carbide, a tough ceramic that can be used in heat shield coatings for spacecraft during atmospheric re-entry.

To make the watch easy to read while its wearer is riding – not that we’ve seen any polo players check the time as they charge down the field – the watch’s movement and windows are positioned at a 30-degree angle. Its compact layout and features such as skeletonised baseplate and bridges make the lightweight movement less vulnerable to centrifugal and centripetal forces generated during a game.
IN GOLF: Bubba Watson, Cristie Kerr, Diana Luna
When we spoke to Richard Mille marketing director Tim Malachard last November, he cited the brand’s signing of American golfer Bubba Watson (pictured) as one of his most memorable moments. Malachard recalled: “We signed him because he was an interesting character. When we signed him in 2011, he had only won one PGA tournament in the US and he was ranked 28th in the world. The next year he won the Masters, which was crazy.”

Launched in 2014, the most recent timepiece inspired by the self-taught American golfer is the RM 38-01 G-Sensor Tourbillon Bubba Watson. Fittingly, the watch dedicated to one of the biggest hitters in golf – who has recorded drives of more than 400 yards (366m) – features a g-sensor, located at 12 o’clock. Capable of measuring up to 20g’s of acceleration, the titanium mechanism refl ects the force generated by a golfer’s swing. The model shown here is made from hardy and lightweight Quartz TPT. There’s also a version with green bezels made from TZP-G, a ceramic that is signifi cantly stiff er than regular high-tech ceramics, which means the watch is less prone to cracking.

Fun fact: English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran was recently spotted wearing the RM 38-01 at a music awards show. No word, however, on whether he was wearing it when he accidentally hit fellow artiste Justin Bieber in the face with a golf club during a drunken night out in Japan some time back.