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"  LE MANS, FRANCE - For insight into Richard Mille&amp;#039;s obsession with performance, look no further than his garage: his vast collection includes a Ferrari 512M, Porsche 917, Lola T70, and V16-powered BRM, and the Brittany-based watchmaker is not afraid to race his six and seven-figure toys. &amp;quot;I love cars, aircraft, and watches,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;There are so many similarities.&amp;quot; Richard Mille disdains watches with ornamental automotive themes like tire tread wristbands and steering spoke hands, and believes the idea that a watch should be weighty is an outdated conceit, in the same way that overweight cars are a thing of the past. Take, for instance, his RM 027 Tourbillon, the $590,000 wristwatch which was famously swiped (and recovered) from tennis star Rafael Nadal&amp;#039;s hotel room. The automatic timepiece is the lightest mechanical watch on the planet, and incorporates carbon nanofiber construction and an aluminum lithium movement that weighs in at a mere 3.8 grams. Though it feels virtually weightless, the watch-- which was researched and developed using Nadal&amp;#039;s wrist as a proving ground-- can withstand 800 Gs.  While Mille uses athletes like Nadal and Ferrari F1 driver Felipe Massa to develop his prototypes, he&amp;#039;s looking skyward for his next watch. According to Mille, the the RM 039 Aviation E6-B Flyback (seen above) uses a bezel that can be used to calculate &amp;quot;fuel burn, flight times, ground speed, density altitude or wind correction,&amp;quot; as well as unit conversions-- many of the variables managed by the E6-B circular sliderule invented by U.S. Naval Lieutenant Philip Dalton in the 1930s. Unlike the slide rule, the watch incorporates over 1,000 parts, some of which are so small they&amp;#039;re invisible to the naked eye. If absolute accuracy is your only consideration, Mille admits that a five dollar quartz watch will outperform a $2 million mechanical watch. But for complex mechanical art you can wear on your wrist, these outrageously ambitious horological creations have a weird way of capturing a gearhead&amp;#039;s imagination. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a7874/richard-mille-on-why-car-guys-love-watches/>