Over the weekend, at the Miami Grand Prix, McLaren driver Lando Norris overhauled Red Bull rival Max Verstappen to take the chequered flag, with a smashing victory. This marks his maiden Formula 1 win, after coming close to getting the number-one spot on the podium several times in the past. In fact, Norris, who has driven for McLaren since his F1 debut as a 19-year-old in 2019, was eliminated at the first corner in the Miami sprint race on Saturday.
But as the 24-year-old British driver celebrated his 24-lap lead to the chequered flag, we couldn’t help noticing Norris’s wrist game being equally on point. He wore the Richard Mille RM 67-02 High Jump “Mutaz Essa Barshim” watch, which costs around $120,500, that is approximately a crore.
Richard Mille x Mutaz Essa Barshim is an ode to Mutaz Essa Barshim, who is a Qatari high jump specialist, and currently holds the national record and Asian record in high jump with a best mark of 2.43 metres. The lightweight timepiece is made for elite athletes and is designed to be adapted to various sporting disciplines. The whole case and band has a thickness of only 7.8mm and weighs merely 32 grams, thanks to a combination of materials like TPT® composite materials, grade 5 titanium, and the elastic wristband, making it the lightest strap ever created by the brand.
McLaren and Richard Mille have had a long-standing partnership for more than a decade. In fact, this partnership led to the creation of RM 50-03 in 2017, in collaboration with the University of Manchester which worked with the watchmakers and the McLaren F1 team to design the lightest mechanical chronograph in the world that combined cutting-edge research in graphene with precision engineering.
Founded in 2001, Richard Mille is a Swiss watch company started by Dominique Guenat and Richard Mille, and are known for their extravagant timepieces. In fact, quite recently Mark Zuckerberg was spotted admiring Anant Ambani’s Rs 18.2 crore Richard Mille watch at the latter’s pre-wedding celebrations in Jamnagar.
