There is a number that haunts serious makers. Not a lap time, a horsepower figure, or even a price. The number is 1.618 – the Golden Ratio, that ancient mathematical constant found in nautilus shells, in the spiral arms of galaxies, in the proportions of the Parthenon and in the underdrawings of Leonardo. It also happens to be the founding obsession of Bianchet, a fierce young Swiss watchmaker from Neuchâtel whose founder Rodolfo Festa Bianchet has spent the better part of a decade proving that a watch movement can be engineered entirely from pure mathematics. When Maserati came calling, it wasn’t exactly a corporate partnership sealed over a conference table in Geneva. It was, as both parties will tell you, something closer to two people finishing each other’s sentences.
Start with the occasion. In 1926, a Maserati Tipo 26 roared through the dust and hairpins of the Targa Florio and claimed class victory on the car’s very first competitive outing. Bolted to its nose for the first time was a trident, borrowed from the Neptune fountain in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore, the city where Alfieri Maserati and his brothers had founded the company twelve years earlier. That symbol has meant something specific ever since: Italian performance, controlled temperament, a refusal to be ordinary. One hundred years later, it is suspended inside a flying tourbillon, nine-point-nine millimetres above your wrist. That is what the UltraFino Maserati is – one hundred individually numbered pieces, produced entirely by hand at Bianchet’s atelier in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the Jura mountain city at the very heart of Swiss haute horlogerie.
“UltraFino Maserati is not a watch inspired by a car. It is where two objects that speak the same language come together,” says Rodolfo Festa Bianchet, Founder and CEO of Bianchet.
The MCPURA – unveiled at Goodwood last summer – is where the watch begins. Its Nettuno V6, twin-turbocharged and drawing its pre-chamber combustion directly from Formula 1, produces 630 horsepower from a 3.0-litre engine built around a carbon-fibre monocoque. The wheels are birdcage-design rims whose spokes divide into three at the rim, forming, deliberately, a trident. At Goodwood, the car wore Ai Aqua Rainbow – a Fuoriserie finish that shifts through blues, greens and purples depending on your angle, like deep water seen from above. The watch wears it too: across the skeleton dial and along the rubber seam of the case, that thin stripe of colour Bianchet has used as a signature since their very first watch.
The movement – the Bianchet UT01 calibre – is one of the thinnest automatic flying tourbillons on earth. At 3.85 millimetres thick and eight grams, 225 hand-finished components do their work inside it: bridges bevelled on every edge, a suspended mainspring barrel, and a tourbillon cage 2.66 millimetres tall spinning once per minute. The tourbillon was patented by Breguet in 1801 – long obsolete as a precision tool, but irreplaceable as proof that the maker cared enough to do things the hardest possible way. Bianchet’s is a flying tourbillon, cantilevered from beneath with no upper bridge, suspended visually in mid-air. Shock resistance is rated to 5,000 G – fifty times the force of a high-speed collision – mirroring, in miniature, the logic of the MCPURA’s own suspension: absorb the force so the performance can breathe.
Founded in 2017 by Rodolfo and Emmanuelle Festa Bianchet – he from fintech, she a Roman-born painter and musician steeped in Renaissance art – Bianchet has moved fast for so young a maison. Their first watch won Best Start-Up at the Temporis International Awards in 2023, judged by Philippe Dufour and Kari Voutilainen. In 2024 they became timekeeping partner to Maserati MSG Racing’s Formula E team. This Geneva unveiling is not a first meeting. It is a deepening of something already in motion.
One hundred watches. One hundred years. Each piece numbered, guaranteed for five years, finished by hand — 40mm wide, 9.9mm thin, 36 grams on the wrist. The mathematics, as Bianchet would tell you, are not coincidental. The Golden Ratio does not deal in coincidences.
