On a clear night in the mountains, you look up into the darkness and see the stars, and you know that the photons reaching your retina have been travelling through space at a speed of 186,000 miles per hour for hundreds of years. Your today is someone else’s long distant yesteryear. The mystery of time is up there, part of the invisible fabric of the blackness of space, somethig impossible to fathom. The same sort of sensation is provided by a watch like the Richard Mille RM 67-01 Automatic Extra Flat, a new version of the maison’s classic RM 010 Automatic, in which the skeletonization reveals parts of the movement in which baseplate and bridges have an inky darkness created by grey and black electroplasma treatment, creating a sense of depth that works in the opposite direction to the other objective for the designers in this piece: a total thickness of just 7.55 mm.

Case and dial

The numerals, mounted on two titanium rails attached to the movement, are hollowed out from solid metal and filled with Luminova. The same luminescent material is used to frame the date window for the semi-instantaneous date display at 5 o’clock. There is a crown function indicator between 1 and 2 o’clock, which changes position between Winding, Date and Hand-setting as you pull out or push in the crown. The case is a highly complex construction, the slimmest in the Richard Mille range, with dimensions 38.70 x 47.52 x 7.75mm. It has a sapphire watchglass and caseback.

Movement

The self-winding CRMA6 movement, 3.6mm in thickness, was designed in-house, with baseplate and bridges in titanium and a winding rotor weight in platinum. Everything is open-worked, including the mainspring barrel, rotor, going train and automatic winding mechanism bridges. The movement has a power reserve of about 50 hours; the watch’s performance is optimized by the special profile used for the wheels’ teeth that improve energy transfer as they turn. The calibre runs at 28,800 vph (4 Hertz)