In the conventional luxury watch sponsorship model, an athlete wears a brand’s watch in editorial photographs and at public appearances. The watch is visible; the athlete is aspirational; the combination sells. Richard Mille has always operated on a different premise. For Richard Mille, athletes are not models — they are test environments. The extreme conditions of elite sport — gravitational forces, temperature variation, vibration, sweat, impact — are understood by the brand as a proving ground that no laboratory can replicate. And within that philosophy, Formula 1 drivers, who operate under sustained G-forces and in cockpit environments that place extreme demands on any object worn on the wrist, are among the most valuable partners the brand can have.
Charles Leclerc has been part of Richard Mille’s athlete network since 2018, shortly before his breakthrough season with Sauber and his subsequent move to Scuderia Ferrari in 2019. The relationship has evolved from early sponsorship into a co-development partnership that has produced a series of watches carrying his name. The most recent, the RM72-01, released in 2025, is an automatic flyback chronograph limited to 150 pieces and priced at $330,000 — a watch that, in its red-and-white Monégasque colour scheme and its technical specification, is as much a portrait of its namesake as a commercial product.
The RM72-01 Charles Leclerc
The RM72-01 represents the latest evolution of a design language that Richard Mille has developed specifically for Leclerc. Earlier watches — most notably the RM 67-02 Automatic Winding Extra Flat Charles Leclerc Prototype — established the visual grammar: red and white, the colours of Monaco’s flag, combined with the ultra-thin case architecture that has become Richard Mille’s signature technical achievement. The RM 67-02 prototype, donated to the Only Watch charity auction in 2021, fetched CHF 2.1 million — a figure that communicated both the watch’s collector appeal and Leclerc’s cultural value as a brand partner.
The RM72-01 continues this grammar at greater complexity: an automatic flyback chronograph powered by Richard Mille’s CRMC-1 calibre, with a case design that references Ferrari’s aesthetic language alongside Leclerc’s own. The 150-piece limitation and $330,000 price point position it firmly in the ultra-luxury tier, well above the level at which watch brands typically partner with sports figures. Richard Mille is not using Leclerc to sell accessible product. It is using him to produce singular objects whose value derives partly from their scarcity and partly from the depth of the relationship they document.
The Ferrari Connection
Richard Mille’s relationship with Leclerc does not exist in isolation from its broader Ferrari partnership. Since 2021, Richard Mille has been the Official Watch of Scuderia Ferrari — a team partner relationship that places the brand’s logo on the cars and on drivers’ helmets, and that has produced a series of co-branded watches drawing on Ferrari’s automotive design language. The RM 43-01 Tourbillon Split-Seconds Chronograph Ferrari, launched in 2025, is among the most technically ambitious of these collaborations, capped at 150 pieces and drawing visual cues from Ferrari’s mechanical components.
Leclerc, as Ferrari’s most established driver and the team’s designated luxury ambassador at Richard Mille, is the human embodiment of both relationships simultaneously — personal ambassador and team partner in one. He carries Richard Mille’s watches as part of his individual ambassador relationship while also representing the Ferrari team’s official timepiece partner. The brand presence on his wrist is therefore doubly reinforced: personal ambassador and team partner in one.
The arrival of Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari for the 2025 season added another dimension. Hamilton, one of the most fashion-forward figures in Formula 1 history, brought his own luxury brand relationships to the team — while also existing within a team context where Richard Mille has structural presence. The intersection of Hamilton’s fashion credentials and Scuderia Ferrari’s Richard Mille partnership creates a Ferrari media environment of unusual commercial density — two of the sport’s most high-profile drivers, one with a confirmed watch ambassador role, the other with one of the strongest luxury fashion crossovers in Formula 1 history, operating under the same roof.
Ultra-Thin, Ultra-Resistant: The Technical Claim
What distinguishes Richard Mille from most watch brands in its approach to athlete partnerships is the seriousness of its engineering claim. The brand does not assert that its watches are tested to perform under extreme conditions as a marketing fiction — it asserts it as a provable fact, because its partnerships are structured to make it true. Leclerc wears his Richard Mille watches during race weekends. The G-forces experienced during braking and cornering in a Formula 1 car — sustained lateral forces exceeding 5G, peak braking forces approaching 6G — subject any wristwatch to conditions that standard certification processes do not simulate.
Richard Mille’s technical philosophy, developed through early partnerships with athletes including Rafael Nadal and Felipe Massa, holds that survival under these conditions is the only meaningful test of a watch’s engineering quality. The brand’s case materials — Carbon TPT, quartz TPT, titanium alloys — and its movement architecture are developed with these conditions in mind. The claim is not that the watch is used during racing as a timing instrument; it is that the watch is genuinely worn, and genuinely survives.
In the broader watch industry, this is a distinctive and costly strategy. Producing watches capable of genuinely performing under Formula 1 conditions requires engineering investment that most brands at lower price points cannot justify. Richard Mille’s position at the very top of the market — where $300,000-plus prices are standard for its more complex pieces — is what makes the investment sustainable. The athlete-as-testing-platform model, which Leclerc embodies as thoroughly as any partner in the brand’s portfolio, is both the brand’s USP and its most compelling editorial story. In Formula 1’s current luxury moment, it is also proving to be a very well-timed one.