Royal Ammar bin Humaid Al Nuaimi spotted wearing a Richard Mille

Sheikh Ammar bin Humaid Al Nuaimi, Crown Prince of Ajman and one of the UAE's most visible royal watch enthusiasts, was recently spotted wearing a Richard Mille RM 27-01 Tourbillon Rafael Nadal cased in Quartz TPT® — one of only ten examples ever made. At $862,000, this is not merely a luxury purchase; it is the acquisition of an object that sits at the absolute technical frontier of contemporary horology.

The Richard Mille RM 27-01 was conceived in close collaboration with Rafael Nadal for the 2013 tennis season, with a singular engineering brief: build a tourbillon wristwatch capable of surviving the mechanical violence of a professional tennis match. The result is a movement suspended inside the case by a network of cables tensioned to just 3 kg — a construction inspired by suspension bridge engineering. The manually wound tourbillon caliber, the RM 27-01, operates at 3 Hz and delivers approximately 70 hours of power reserve, all while tolerating shock loads that would destroy any conventional movement architecture.

The Quartz TPT® case material — a composite formed from silica filaments impregnated with resin and compressed in a proprietary process — gives each watch a uniquely patterned surface that can never be exactly replicated. This, combined with the production run of exactly ten pieces, elevates the RM 27-01 Quartz TPT beyond even Richard Mille's normally rarefied production standards. The reference sits in a different category from the more widely distributed Nadal collaborations that followed, including the RM 27-02 and RM 27-03.

Sheikh Ammar bin Humaid Al Nuaimi has long been associated with the kind of horological connoisseurship that gravitates toward technical audacity over decorative convention — a sensibility perfectly aligned with Richard Mille's design philosophy. His choice of the RM 27-01 over more commercially visible references signals a collector who engages with the specification sheet as seriously as the aesthetics.

On the secondary market, examples of the Richard Mille RM 27-01 in Quartz TPT® rarely surface, and when they do, prices routinely exceed the original retail figure. With only ten produced globally, grey-market scarcity is structural rather than cyclical, and demand from Gulf, Asian, and European collectors ensures that the reference retains — and typically appreciates — its extraordinary value.