Entrepreneur Luca Cordero di Montezemolo spotted wearing a Richard Mille

Few watch sightings carry as much biographical weight as Luca Cordero di Montezemolo wearing the titanium Richard Mille MBZ 010. As Ferrari's president from 1991 to 2014 and the architect of the Scuderia's most dominant era in the 2000s, Montezemolo shaped the Formula 1 landscape that the MBZ 010 was literally built to celebrate — the inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina in 2009.

The Richard Mille MBZ 010 was created at the personal request of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, whose initials form the reference designation itself. Limited to just 200 examples, the piece is housed in a grade-5 titanium tonneau case — the material Richard Mille had already made its structural signature by the late 2000s — offering exceptional strength-to-weight ratio on the wrist. The skeletonized dial features a rendered layout of the Yas Marina Circuit, the street circuit designed by Hermann Tilke that has closed the Formula 1 season calendar ever since. The movement is based on Richard Mille's caliber with hours, minutes, and seconds, finished to the maison's standard of visible, architecturally articulated micromechanics.

From a collector's standpoint, the MBZ 010 occupies a rare category: a Richard Mille that is simultaneously a diplomatic object, a motorsport artifact, and a horological limited edition. The royal provenance encoded directly into the reference number elevates it well beyond a standard RM commemorative piece. Secondary market appearances are infrequent, and when examples do surface, provenance documentation becomes a significant factor in final price.

Montezemolo's connection to Formula 1 royalty — both institutional and literal — makes this pairing read less as coincidence and more as a natural extension of relationships forged across decades at the highest levels of the sport. His tenure at Ferrari overlapped precisely with Richard Mille's rise as the watch brand of the F1 paddock.

The MBZ 010 was never widely available through retail channels in the conventional sense, given its commissioned, edition-controlled nature. Grey market valuations for confirmed examples have historically exceeded six figures, driven by scarcity, provenance, and the enduring collector appetite for early Richard Mille references with defined narratives.