To begin with the RM engineers needed

Picture this; it's a inviting Sunday afternoon and you are suiting up with your friends to play a friendly but intense game of Polo, otherwise known as the adventure of Kings. There's just one problem, you will need a way to keep an eye on the time whilst at the same time still letting those around you know that you could purchase and sell them at the drop of a hat. Enter the RM053, possibly one of the most unrealistic and yet surprisingly most legible pieces to be released by perennial favorite Richard Mille.

Making The Unrealistic Practical (Sort of)
Of course the RM053 was not created just so you could continue to overtly display your wealth even when participating in the more rigorous activities of life – although with a price tag of US$580, 000 that is kind of hard to avoid – but instead to meet up with another Richard Mille essential. That is, that the watch appear on the arm of its ambassador when he or she was undertaking the game that had made him or her famous in the first place (think Rafael Nadal, and more recently Yohan Blake). In this case that arm sits to renowned Argentinean polo player Pablo MacDonough, who signed with the brand back in 2011.

As you can imagine a Polo field can be quite a dangerous place for the sapphire very of a watch face, with golf balls and mallets flying in all directions. Jaeger-LeCoultre came up with a nifty little way to overcome this problem by creating the Reverso collection, simply allowing the individual to reverse the switch so your sapphire very was protected. Ever the visionary however Richard Mille has chosen a fully different and rather more extreme solution to this age old conundrum.

It's All In the event
The result is a rather futuristic looking case, which to be honest is more metal than anything else. Well, ultra-light titanium to be precise, which has then been treated with a super hard titanium carbide coating to make it extra strong. Thinly veiled sarcasm aside though, the movement of this unique piece actually are quite complex.

To begin with the RM engineers needed to ensure that the hand twisted tourbillon movement could withstand the bangs from the inevitable impacts of a spirited game of Polo – not to mention those from MacDonough's own teammates who presumably can't resist the urge to give him a friendly tap on the arm every now and then with their mallets just to see if his watch will be as strong as he claims. The case itself plays a large part in this obviously however to increase structural hardness the movement also boasts a special skeletonized baseplate and links made of grade 5 titanium held together with spline screws and made so closely together they almost act as one.

On the face of the watch, if you can call it that, two small knobs have been set at 30 degrees towards the bottom of the case. The one on the most appropriate one indicates the hour and minute whilst the one on the left keeps track of the seconds via a 60-second tourbillon. That's right, a tourbillon. Were you really expecting any less from the master himself? As a final touch the sapphire deposits have been recessed into the switch cutouts, thus protecting them completely from any stray golf balls or mallets, whilst still enabling full visibility of that time period signals.

Ironically enough, whilst this may very well be one of the smallest time displays you'll come across on a Richard Mille timepiece, thanks to its relative simplicity, it's also likely to end up one of the most legible.