Richard Mille RM011 Roberto Mancini – RM011-01 AN TI

The art of complications isn't specifically a Richard Mille skill. And yet whenever the watchmaker from La Jura puts one into his luxury watches, it feels as though he's just invented it.
With the Richard Mille RM011 Roberto Mancini , the brand has done it again. This time, it has taken a complication (the flyback chronograph) that appears on dozens of high-end watches, and made it feel like proprietary technology.
On the Richard Mille RM011-01 AN TI, the flyback becomes a mechanism for precisely measuring the elapsed and remaining time in a football match. The trick is performed by marking the dial with the standard 45-minute half, plus a 15-minute extra time segment and two overtime slots (five minutes each). In effect, the dial allows the wearer to display all the likely combinations of timekeeping requirement: normal halves, up to 15 minutes of stoppage time, and extra time plus overtime.
As with all Richard Mille watches , the question you've got to ask is: why? A top-flight football match is well served with timekeeping devices already. There's the scoreboard clock, the ref's stopwatch, and the fourth official's board. What you won't find in a football ground, though, is a function for counting down the elapsing seconds of injury time. And this is where the Richard Mille RM011 Roberto Mancini both defines itself as a classic Richard Mille, and lifts itself above some of the other offerings from the company.
I've talked before about how a Richard Mille luxury watch is all about what can be done, rather than what needs to be done. What I mean by that is that Richard Mille timepieces frequently set themselves a problem that doesn't really need solving (like measuring G force in a supercar), and then solve it anyway.
The Richard Mille RM011-01 AN TI – Roberto Mancini is different, in that it sets itself a problem that does need resolution, and works out a solution by combining the mechanical alacrity of the flyback function with the graphical cleverness of the dial. This is, in fact, almost an identical solution to that posed by a tachymetric scale. In the same way that a tachymeter turns a mechanical watch into a speedometer, the dial on the Richard Mille RM011 Roberto Mancini turns the watch into a tactical instrument.
Roberto Mancini himself disclosed to Richard Mille that the final seconds of a half, or a match, were a mystery to managers thanks to the fact that there's no way of displaying them in the stadium. As decisions made during these mystery seconds can determine the whole course of a game, Richard Mille decided to use the chrono flyback to give Mancini a ready reference with which to inform his last-gasp tactical calls.
The flyback function allows a chrono to keep whirring while the chrono hand is reset: effectively allowing the wearer to time specific segments within a larger stretch of time (like the moments of injury time at the end of the game). How you interpret the chrono hand depends largely on what registers are painted on the dial of your watch. In the case of the Richard Mille RM011 Roberto Mancini , activating the flyback will either take you back to the beginning of a new half, or to the start of extra time or stoppage time.
This simple, ingenious solution is housed in the classic Richard Mille tonneau case: the bezel, caseband, and case back are in satin-finished titanium (a red gold version is also available), and the whole thing is water resistant to 50 m. Sapphire crystals on the bezel and caseback sides, both treated front and back with anti-glare treatment, allow a clear view of Calibre RMAC1: an in-house automatic movement with central hours, minutes, seconds, and flyback chrono. The calibre also displays month and date (annual calendar function).
Design is impeccable: the transparent dial is overlaid with red wedges, which mark out the different segments of a football match, and the month and day counters are surrounded with green lines to recall the shape and hue of a well-maintained pitch. The Alcryn collar surrounding the double-sealed crown is in the same green.
The bracelet is in black rubber, and is secured with a titanium double-fold clasp. Arabic numerals and lumed indices tell the time. The hour and minute hand are applied with lumed arrows.
The Richard Mille RM011 Roberto Mancini is every inch a classic: a luxury sports watch designed with one sporting application in mind. Wear it on the touchline, in the dugout, or the director's box—if you can get your hands on one.
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Image Credit – officialwatches.com vedere di piu rolex copia e Breitling Skyracer