Depending on your position, Sébastien Loeb’s retirement will have provoked mixed emotions. For Loeb, his decision last September meant leaving the sport he had dominated for a decade. For his beleaguered competitors, it meant the World Rally Championship (WRC) the following year would have a new winner – for the first time since 2003. For fans of the sport, it meant the end of an era.
Loeb departed the WRC as one of the all-time motor sport greats. With nine titles under his belt, he ranks alongside Valentino Rossi, who has nine motorcycling world championships to his name, and Michael Schumacher, who has won more F1 titles than anyone else with seven. Special records, special people.
In January this year, Loeb was introduced as a Richard Mille partner. The relationship between the two wasn’t unexpected, or at least it wasn’t hard to see how it came about. Mille is an ardent motor sport enthusiast and a collector of vintage rally cars. It helps too, no doubt, that both men are French.
‘Things just clicked between Richard and me,’ says Loeb, when asked what brought them together. ‘Yes, being French helps, but it was the things we’re both passionate about that drew us together – I’m talking about a passion for motor sport, obviously, but also extreme engineering, the pursuit of perfection, care for every detail and so on.’
Richard Mille watches are often known by the brand’s strapline Racing machines on the wrist, which clearly appealed to Loeb, who takes his place in the Mille paddock alongside F1 drivers Felipe Massa and Jules Bianchi, and FIA boss Jean Todt.
The synergies are clear, clearer arguably than in any other Richard Mille partnership or watch that’s gone before. Like F1 cars, rally cars are built using space age materials and with enormous attention to the details that will make them faster and more reliable. But a rally car also has to be built to survive massive and repeated impacts in a way a F1 car does not. In that sense, rally cars have as much in common with the shock-resistant materials Mille uses in his watches as any other racing machine.
Mille famously only signs deals with sports stars who can actually wear and test his watches under extreme conditions, and prefers the term partner over ambassador (presumably Jean Todt’s feisty presidential battles prevent him from being the exception to the rule). That’s why we’ve never seen a Richard Mille promoted by a footballer or a basketball player, for whom wearing watches in play is strictly verboten.
Loeb may have retired from rallying in 2012, but he’s some way from retreating into the automotive hinterland. This season he entered four WRC rallies (he won two of them – galling, you would imagine, for drivers who thought they’d seen the back of him) and next year he will compete for a Citroen team built around him in the World Touring Car Championships (WTCC).
‘You never get tired of winning but sometimes you need new challenges to move forward,’ admits Loeb. ‘The WTCC is a new challenge and I’m feeling very motivated by it. It’s exciting because it’s a very different discipline to rallying, which forces me to question myself and work hard to learn and progress.’
He will be wearing a Richard Mille on his wrist when he lines up on the grid in Morocco on April 6 next spring, but for now, there’s no confirmation of exactly which model. A Sébastien Loeb limited edition? ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘You’ll have to wait until SIHH in January to see and hear more about what is to come.’
You’d be hard pressed to find more than one interpretation of that statement. Pity is that it reveals nothing of where Richard Mille might take a watch inspired by his compatriot’s achievements. A flyback chronograph cased in a lightweight material pumped full of carbon nanotubes? A limited edition of nine pieces? Or of 78 to mark the number of rallies won by Loeb?
Loeb will be at the SIHH next month, probably, one assumes, for the unveiling of such a watch. One to look out for.
