When Marlon Brando takes the sheriff’s daughter, Kathie, out for a ride in the 1953 movie The Wild One, you don’t need a degree in film studies to spot the central message. America was gripped by a pearl-clutching moral panic at the time, about greasy biker gangs and an alienated postwar youth.
Kathie’s dreamy response in the film – her attraction to danger, her urge to escape – was a warning to conservative small-town America about a restless generation in black leather jackets.
These days, society isn’t worried about bikers (unless you count the e-bike hoodlums who snatch phones from unsuspecting pedestrians). But motorbikes are still fast and scary. In a world where risk is constantly assessed and erased, the danger remains every bit as seductive as Brando’s brooding character. Which is why luxury brands are now leaning into motorcycles as a way of cultivating a bit of edgy rebellion.
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British fashion house Burberry, for example, teamed up with French bike-maker DAB to make a modern scrambler; luxury brands Bulgari and Bentley both did Ducati collaborations; and Breitling recently launched a special edition bike with Triumph.
Now Richard Mille, the Swiss watch brand renowned for its exotic materials and eye-watering prices, has its first motorcycle – and its first collaboration with another brand that isn’t a watch. Instead, the result is a two-wheeled incarnation of danger and defiance.
The Richard Mille x Brough Superior RMB01 has a big name with a big back story.
Brough Superior was founded in Nottingham in 1919 by George Brough (pronounced ‘Bruff’). Over the next 20 years he built bikes at the absolute pinnacle, designed and built with a meticulous attention to detail and a total disregard for cost. Known as the ‘Rolls-Royce of motorcycles’, they were sold to the wealthy and famous, such as Orson Welles and George Bernard Shaw. The SS100 model – capable of 100mph – was made famous by TE Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, who died on one in 1935. It only added to the Brough Superior legend – few brands celebrate the death of a customer quite so enthusiastically.
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The company dissolved in 1940 when the government took over the factory to make Spitfire parts. With only 283 examples of the SS100 ever made, they’ve since became hugely sought after, with good examples making more than £350,000 at auction.
Now jump forward to 2007, when a British enthusiast called Mark Upham bought the Brough Superior IP rights. He turned to a French bike designer, Thierry Henriette, to bring the brand back to life, and in 2013 a new SS100 was launched, a kind of steam-punk re-imagining of the original, with a modern V-twin engine, designed and built in-house. Henriette later bought the rights from Upham, and – together with his business partner Albert Castaigne – the new company set up a small factory in Toulouse, building a couple of bikes a week.
Toulouse, it turns out, is a great place to make exclusive, low-volume motorcycles. As the home of Airbus, the city has nurtured an ecosystem of aerospace suppliers, specialising in small-batch, high-quality alloy, carbon and titanium parts. So, like the original, the new SS100 is a money-no-object, zero-compromise, hand-built wonder – a tailor-made engineering jewel, glinting with machined-from-solid alloy. The price tag is £70,000, which in the bike world is ridiculous – a brand-new Honda Fireblade is £24,000; a top-of-the-range Ducati V4 R is £38,000.
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But forget the price, the big question is how the retro-looking SS100 led to the sci-fi Richard Mille RMB01, which resembles a cross between a robot insect and a Tron bike. It was another collaboration – between Brough and Aston Martin, announced in 2019 – that piqued the interest of Richard Mille, the man who gives his name to the watch brand known for its ‘racing machines on the wrist’. As you’d expect, however, this new project is rather different.
A Richard Mille spokesperson freely admits there was not a great deal of customer analysis – it was a passion project, they say, with a like-minded company. ‘The way [Brough Superior] manufacture is very similar to what we do. There’s the same obsession with detail, with materials – if we’ve got two choices on a component, a cheaper one or a more expensive one, we’ll go for the more expensive one, for the finish and the quality. They do that as well.’ So the project began, with Mille’s watch designers feeding into Brough’s initial sketches.
‘A bike is first and foremost functional,’ the RM spokesperson says as we stand in front of the new RMB01 in the Brough factory. ‘So you look at how mechanical the chassis and the engine are – it’s very similar to what we do on our watch cases. Everything we do is about technicity and performance. I remember in the past we were inspired by Ducati – I think it was the Monster, which had these anodised structural parts in the frame. So we wanted the RMB01 to be very skeletal and transparent, like our watches.’
The foundations are those basic Brough building blocks – the 997cc V-twin engine, the unusual wishbone front suspension and unique, low-volume parts, machined from alloy and carbon. There were around 12 ‘design iterations’, says Castaigne, executive director at Brough Superior. The one chosen by Richard Mille evokes the history of ‘board-track racing’, which was popular in the US in the 1920s.
‘We had some fairing,’ Castaigne goes on, ‘but Richard wanted to see the engine completely.’ Other characteristic RM details are evident throughout, from the watch-like speedo, with visible gearing, to the patterns in the solid parts.
‘These are the watch codes,’ says the Richard Mille representative, pointing out ‘machined flat surfaces’, ‘forged carbon’ and ‘wheels that look like tourbillon cages’.
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Like the Aston Martin bike, the new RMB01 is track only, to avoid having to worry about the lights, indicators and exhaust required by road legislation. It’s limited to just 150 examples worldwide and is priced at an astronomical €200,000 before tax. This is off-the-scale expensive for a motorcycle but, the company insists, it knows its customers. The brand estimates only 10 per cent will actually take it to a track to ride.
‘A lot of people interested in the project aren’t necessarily pure bikers,’ the spokesperson says. ‘A lot are car collectors. I think the majority will have this as a toy, they’ll want to keep it in their garage, they’ll put it next to all their classic cars. Some will keep it in their house, in their chalet in the Alps, or a seaside villa. Our customers, they collect all sorts of things, whether it be artwork, classic cars, modern cars – they have all of it.’
Richard Mille itself is treating the bike as a kind of sculpture, displaying it in its boutique in Tokyo and in two of its US flagships.
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And as a sculpture, does it just represent speed, or is there still that lingering sense of rebellion? Are bikes still a bit ‘wild’?
‘Bikers were always a bit of a rebel,’ the Richard Mille executive says. ‘You know – a bit dirty, greasy, the leather jackets. Now it’s gone very upmarket, it’s a lot more clinical. Even the Japanese brands – the technology is crazy, the quality, the reliability. But there is still a sense of independence about bikes.’
The RMB01 is an extraordinary bike, one you can pore over in detail when you see it in the metal. Whatever it says about you, owning one means you have a lot of disposable income. Richard Mille watches are known as ‘the billionaires’ secret handshake’; in the shape of the RMB01, members of the triple-comma club can have their very own bike.
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 98. Click here to subscribe
