This new Richard Mille x Ferrari watch costs more than an actual Ferrari

Walk into a Ferrari showroom, pick whichever car you like and, once the dealer has convinced you to spend a little extra on some fancy paint and bits of carbon, you’ll have yourself the world’s most famous supercar for between £200,000 and £500,000.

Or, for more than double that, Richard Mille will hand over its latest Ferrari-branded watch. Two versions are available, each limited to 75 units, and prices run from just over £1,000,000 for the titanium model, to £1,180,000 for the carbon version.

Called the RM 43-01, the watch is as staggeringly complicated as it is expensive. Its full name goes some way towards explaining the price. The RM 43-01 Tourbillon Split-Seconds Chronograph Ferrari has a tourbillon movement, of course, which is a technology reserved for some of the priciest and most complex watches money can buy. More than that though, is how this tourbillon operates a split-seconds chronograph movement.

This refers to how there are two centrally-mounted seconds hands. They run together when you first start the chronograph, but split when you stop the timer, with one stopping and the other continuing until you stop the movement again. This means you can record the times of two things at once – say, for example, the lap times of two cars which started together and finished with a gap between them.

You might, for instance, use this watch to record lap times of both Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc at their next Grand Prix. Or to see which of Ferrari’s F1 drivers can rack up 1,000 likes the quickest with their next Instagram post. The possibilities are as broad as your bank account.

The incredibly busy dial is also home to a power reserve metre in the top-left corner – RM says the watch has up to 70 hours of power reserve, depending on how much the chronograph is used – and a torque metre in the top-right. Then there’s a running seconds complication in the lower-right corner, with five hands used to count in twelves from zero to 60, and a 30-minute counter for the chronograph at the nine o’clock position.

As seen on other Richard Mille watches, an indicator at three o’clock switches between W, N and H (Winding, Neutral, Hacking) to show which function you have selected with a pull of the crown. A tackymetre runs around the outer edge of the dial, which can be used with the central seconds hand to calculate the speed of an object (say, an F1 car) travelling a known distance (like a lap of a race track).

Finally, the time itself is shown with a centrally-mounted set of hour and minute hands. There’s no date window, so you’ll have to check your phone for that, or ask your PA.

Ferrari’s iconic prancing horse logo is found in the lower-left corner, on a plate designed to look like a component of the rear wing of the company’s Le Mans-winning 499P race car. The company’s famous red and yellow paintwork is used across both models (red for the titanium model, yellow for the carbon option), and there’s an exhibition case back for glimpsing another view of the impossibly complex movement within.

Other links to the supercar maker include the 30-minute counter, which looks like a dashboard dial, pusher buttons that echo the shape of an SF90 Stradale’s rear lights, and a rubber strap designed by Centro Stile, Ferrari’s in-house design team.

Water resistant to 30 metres, the Richard Mille RM 43-01 has a case measuring 44.5 x 49.9 x 15.8 mm. Its manually-wound tourbillon chronograph movement has a power reserve of 70 hours and both models are limited to 75 examples. Prices range from CHF 1.15 million to CHF 1.35 million – or approximately £1.01m to £1.18m.