Jackie Chan Just Put the 'Rich' In Richard Mille With a £750,000 Ferrari Collab Watch

Jackie Chan has spent more than 60 years jumping off buildings, dangling from helicopters and generally treating gravity as more of a suggestion than a rule. And it seems his taste in watches is just as extreme.

The 72-year-old Rush Hour star was spotted wearing the Richard Mille RM UP-01 Ferrari, an ultra-thin mechanical watch created in collaboration with the Italian carmaker and limited to just 150 pieces. It measures a frankly ridiculous 1.75mm thick and commands a market price of around £750,000.

It might not look like much of a heavyweight, then, but it certainly packs a punch. Kung Ferrari, if you will.

And yes, you read right, just 1.75mm. For scale, that’s two bank card stacked on top of each other. Getting a mechanical watch this skinny wasn't simply a case of squashing everything down, either. Richard Mille and Ferrari spent several years, dozens of prototypes and more than 6,000 hours of development and laboratory testing getting there. Even more impressively, the mechanical movement powering the watch is just 1.18mm thick.

There is, however, more to it than being exceptionally good at fitting under a shirt cuff. The baseplate and bridges are made from grade 5 titanium—an alloy of 90 per cent titanium, 6 per cent aluminium and 4 per cent vanadium—the material used in aerospace and automotive engineering. Add Kif shock protection and a movement capable of withstanding accelerations of more than 5,000 g and it’s clear this very skinny watch is surprisingly tough. Overkill for the average wrist, perhaps. For Jackie Chan? Maybe sensible!

Making it this thin also meant rethinking how a mechanical watch is put together. Rather than stacking the movement's components on top of one another in the usual way, Richard Mille spread them across a wider surface. Even the controls have been worked into the bezel: one crown lets you choose between winding and setting the time, while another actually does it. Somehow, there's still room for around 45 hours of power reserve.

Only 150 were made, Ferrari's prancing horse sits proudly on the front and, at around £750,000 on the market, each millimetre of thickness is effectively setting you back more than £400,000.

This story originally appeared on Esquire.com/uk.

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