Imagine trying to time two runners who cross the start line together but finish apart. One ordinary stopwatch cannot do it; the moment you stop the hand for the first runner, you have lost the second. The solution is one of the most difficult things a mechanical watch can be asked to do, and it is the beating heart of this Richard Mille: the split-seconds chronograph, or rattrapante, a machine built to time two simultaneous events at once. The RM 65-01 is the most complicated automatic watch Richard Mille has ever made, and everything about it is turned up to its maximum setting, but the split-seconds mechanism is the feat around which the whole design is organised.
Here is how the trick works. A split-seconds chronograph carries not one chronograph seconds hand but two, stacked precisely on top of each other so that they look like one. Start the timing and both sweep away together, perfectly overlaid. Now press the split button and one hand stops dead while the other keeps running: you read the split time off the frozen hand, note it, and press again, whereupon the stopped hand instantly leaps forward and catches up to its still-running twin, snapping back into perfect overlay as though it had never paused. That catch-up, that leap to rejoin the moving hand, is where the French name comes from, rattraper, to catch up again, and it is fiendishly hard to build. The stopped hand must be held frozen while a delicate clamp grips its own wheel, and it must do so without dragging on or slowing the hand that is still running beside it, and then it must spring forward and land exactly on its twin. A tiny heart-shaped cam and a pair of sprung arms do the work, and coordinating all of it so that neither hand disturbs the other is a benchmark of real watchmaking. To see it laid bare through the open dial, the clamp and levers visible as they operate, is the whole pleasure of the watch.
Because this is Richard Mille, the split-seconds mechanism is not the end of the ambition but the centre of it, and the rest of the watch is engineered to match. It runs at a high frequency, its balance beating faster than an ordinary movement, five times a second, so that the chronograph can slice time into finer increments and measure ever shorter intervals with greater precision, exactly what you want in a stopwatch built for speed. Timing to a fraction of a second is only meaningful if the movement ticks fast enough to resolve it, and this one does, its quickened pulse making it a genuinely sharper instrument.
Then there is the watch's cleverest piece of everyday theatre, and it lives in the pushers and the crown. Look at the case and you find it labelled like a machine, because it is operated like one. The crown carries a function selector, a small pusher-and-indicator system that lets the wearer choose what the crown does, switching between winding, neutral, and hand-setting, with a little window on the dial showing which mode is engaged, so there is never any doubt about what turning the crown will do. And on the other flank sits the feature that gives the watch its restless character: a rapid-winding pusher. Rather than turning the crown patiently dozens of times to fill the mainspring, the wearer simply pumps this button, and each firm press delivers a fast, efficient burst of winding, powering the watch up quickly and with a satisfying mechanical action. It turns the daily ritual of winding into something brisk and tactile, a series of decisive presses rather than a slow twirl, and it suits a watch built entirely around the idea of speed and immediacy. The pushers are colour-coded and marked with their jobs, START, STOP, RESET, WINDING, SECONDS, so the whole case reads like the control panel of a cockpit or a racing car, every function labelled and to hand.
All of that hyperactive machinery lives inside the shape that is unmistakably Richard Mille: the curved tonneau case, that barrel form that hugs the wrist, built in three parts and held together by a ring of spline screws around the bezel, engineered so the case itself becomes part of the structure that protects the movement inside. Normally this is the brand's stealth-material canvas, rendered in carbon or titanium, and that is exactly why this version is so striking, because here the whole case is worked in warm rose gold. The effect is a lovely contradiction: the most aggressively technical, sport-driven, machine-like watch Richard Mille makes, wrought in the softest and most precious of metals, so that a piece built for the racetrack glows with the warmth of fine jewellery. The gold lends real presence and weight to a design usually defined by lightness, and it turns the RM 65-01 from a pure instrument into something richer and more indulgent without dulling a single one of its functions.
The dial, or rather the open framework where a dial would be, is a riot of purposeful colour. The skeletonised movement is exposed across the whole face, its bridges and wheels and the split-seconds clamp all on show, and over that dark mechanism float bright markers and hands in yellow, orange, red, green, and blue, the numerals and sub-dial scales picked out in vivid tones, the tachymeter scale ringing the edge for reading speed. It is busy and technical and joyful all at once, a face that rewards long looking because there is always another detail, another lever, another flash of colour to find. And the whole thing sits here on a green rubber strap, a fresh, sporty green that plays against the rose gold and picks up the green accents scattered across the dial and the function selector, giving the watch a lively, unexpected finish.
That is what makes this RM 65-01 so special. It is Richard Mille's most complicated automatic, built around the split-seconds chronograph, the demanding mechanism that can time two things at once, and pushed to the limit in every direction, faster-beating for finer timing, fitted with a rapid-winding pusher and a crown that lets you choose its function, its case a labelled panel of controls. And then all that restless engineering is cast in warm rose gold and set on a bright green strap, so that the most instrument-like watch in the collection becomes, improbably, one of its most luxurious. It is speed and precision and play, wrapped in gold, worn on the wrist like a small, brilliant machine.
