Felipe Massa’s 2009 crash tested the resilience of a Richard Mille watch

It was back in 2009 when Felipe Massa suffered life-threatening injuries during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix, losing control of his Ferrari at 175mph as a result of being struck on the head by a wayward suspension spring jettisoned from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn. Despite sustaining a fractured skull and enduring an induced coma and extensive surgery, Massa was pronounced fit to drive fewer than 12 weeks later and was back on the grid in time to compete for Ferrari again at the start of the 2010 season.

But only after he had survived the horrific ordeal was it revealed that he had been wearing his Richard Mille RM-006 Tourbillon at the time of the crash – and that it had emerged unscathed and in perfect working order.

Massa had been the first elite sportsman to be recruited by the then eight-year-old Richard Mille brand in a bid to demonstrate that it didn’t merely claim its ultra-valuable watches were built tough, but was happy to prove it, too.

Since then, Richard Mille has taken on a host of stars from the motor sport world for the same purpose, including Alain Prost, rallying phenomenon Sébastien Loeb (for whom a watch incorporating a G-force meter was developed), IndyCar legend Scott Dixon and current F1 drivers Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris.

The fact that Richard Mille could invite the latter pair to be ‘friends of the brand’ despite one driving for Ferrari and the other for McLaren – without ruffling the feathers of either marque – says something for its founder’s standing in the car world as an enthusiast, major collector, co-founder of the Le Mans Classic and champion of motor sport.

He brokered the deal with McLaren Automotive in 2016, since when it has resulted in a range of high-tech, highly expensive models such as the RM40-01 Tourbillon McLaren Speedtail and the RM65-01 McLaren W1, while the Ferrari partnership, launched in 2021, produced the RM UP-01 Ferrari within a year – then the thinnest mechanical wrist watch ever created.

These days Richard Mille, the man, puts most of his energy into his automotive passion, most recently as the driving force behind the improvement, expansion and rebranding of the historic Le Mans Museum into the new M24 Motor Sport Museum. Developed in partnership with the Automobile Club de L’Ouest, the 92,000sq ft venue is the result of the transformation of the original 1961 structure with a modernist extension that houses 120 exceptional competition cars, some owned by the ACO and others from Mille’s personal collection.

The project, together with his numerous other motor sport-related duties (not least as president of the FIA Endurance Commission) led him to hand over the reins of his eponymous watch brand to a new generation four years ago. These days, Cécile and Maxime Guenat (the daughters of watch industry veteran Dominic Guenat, with whom Mille founded the company ) respectively hold the roles of creation and development director and general director, while Mille’s daughter, Amanda, is brand and partnerships director and his son Alexandre is commercial director.

“Our sports partners really do prove that our watches are not only technically and physically robust but they are comfortable”

Alexandre was just 15 when Richard Mille was founded in 2001 and did not expect to one day be running the business. “It was not the plan,” he says. “It just happened organically. My parents had one goal for their children: to be happy. It is what helped us to thrive. I originally wanted to be a movie director, but my father said to me, ‘Get a good degree first,’ so I graduated in law and politics, and then went to movie school.”

As a result of that, he found an internship with a company that made 3D videos for Richard Mille and subsequently went to check out the brand’s US market “for a few weeks”.

“That became four years, and I learned all the commercial aspects before returning to take the helm of the Paris office. I’m now based in Switzerland, managing the commercial side from the manufacture at Les Breuleux.”

Mille Jr says being surrounded by “really good people” makes the process of running what has become one of the 21st century’s most successful watch brands a good deal less daunting than might be expected. He still believes in the power of partnerships, which began with Massa.

“They are key. In watchmaking, you can make a lot of claims that no one is able to prove – but the good thing about our sports partners is that they test everything and they really do prove that our watches are not only technically and physically robust but they are also comfortable.”

It is, as the legendary pre-war watch collector Henry Graves Jr might have said, a case of esse quam videri. Or, ‘to be, rather than to seem’.