I certainly don't condone behavior like this... but I do understand it..


http://biertijd.com/mediaplayer/?itemid=24389

 

Very cool video. It actually mentions (in French) in the beginning that "the driving was done by professionals in a closed environment, do not attempt this on your own". I did see some fast driving amongst other street cars, so I don't know how real or true this is.

 

very nice video!

 

It also says to "drive prudently: the road is not a racetrack."

 

very kool, thanks for posting this. james

 

Sorry but with so many intangibles (other drivers, pedestrians, etc) just a recipe for disaster.

The question is when does luck run out.

 

Nice video. I bet they also used one of the Pursuit Systems Cayenne camera cars to film those sequences too.

 

Im not sure with car I would rather be driving

 

I'm sure most of you have seen this.. It's an 8 minute video clip of a Ferrari racing through the streets of Paris at sun-up.. in 1976.

No trick photography.. no CGI footage.. just ***** to the wall, pedal to the metal street racing.

There's been lots of controversy about this clip since it first came out. Everybody seems to have their own story about it.. whether it's real, whether it's really a Ferrari, and so forth. I wasn't there, so I don't know. But I have seen the footage in many different venues for over 30 years. To this day I believe it's real.

.. but I still believe in Santa Claus..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eidtc55ZqoU

 

LOL. I had the same thought.

As for the driving with "street traffic" I am sure every car on the road was driven by a stunt professional including the guy on the bike.

 

Interesting.

1) I am not sure that the film was not over dubbed.

2) The camera angle gives the impression of speed much greater than it probably was.

3) Regardless of the speed, this guy goes through a bunch of red lights

4) There are way more garbage trucks on the street at that time of day then there are police!

 

I do not think this is real either. If I listened correctly it sounds as though there are 5 gears and he hits the top range of the 5th gear a few times on the straights. But as you look at the scenery he goes by he appears to be going no faster than maybe 60 mph, the lines in the roads don’t even begin to blur together. He even passes by many other moving vehicles at this upper end speed and goes by maybe 15 MPH faster. I am guessing he was going 50 or 60 through most of this video. You also hear a lot of tire squeal and sometimes it seems to be more than one should be hearing. Also the car seems to blip really well when downshifting, something that no one does gear after gear unless they have a sequential gearbox, is one in that car…I highly doubt it. The audio is far to clean and crisp to have been taken from outside the car, and the sounds are to clean to have been taken really inside the car as well. Plus since at the end he happens to show up at the exact time the hot blond crests the hill, a bit hokey.

It reminds me of the original Getaway in Stockholm (can be seen here http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1so77_getaway-in-stockholm-1-porsche-911_auto). Although it does appear to be staged as well, he indeed hits some crazy speeds and drives less than safe for many, many miles.

EDIT: Oh yea the actual point of this thread has a cool video that was filmed by Pros for sure. It is well done and I enjoyed it.

 

I lived in Paris for a while in the 1990's, and it was a well-known "secret" that one way to test a car was to take a fast lap of the city on the Peripherique, the ring road around town, especially in the early morning, when traffic was light. Some of the roads and exits in the original video look like they are on the Peripherique, and I wonder if that was the inspiration for the movie.

Yes, I did do a few laps of Paris in my Porsche, but never at crazy speeds, and not at 3:00 AM, which was when the hard core drivers came out.

The Ferrari video was done by Claude LeLouch, a professional filmmaker. It was also filmed early in the morning, which is when they clean the streets in Paris every day. That is why you see so many garbage trucks. Early in the video, the Ferrari actually drives by what would be my apartment years later.

 

What? Has someone been bad mouthing the Santa man again?

They say that video was shot by Claude Lelouche using one of the then-new gyro-stabilized cameras on a Ferrari 275 GTS driven by a Formula One driver, and he got arrested after its release for endangering public safety. Or something. Yeah, but...

This is the guy who got famous for "Un Homme et Une Femme" and the video has been defended as an example of cinéma vérité although the only thing vérité about it seems to be that it was a car driving through Paris. Everything else is disputed and has been contradicted by Lelouche himself or others at various times. This was before YouTube of course and he released it on DVD with the title C'était un Rendezvous ("It was a date").

Later comments by him suggest he was driving his own Mercedes 450SL 6.9 and dubbed in the sound later. Someone found a still shot that shows a conventional camera mounted on a regular rail on that car. No gyro mounts, no Ferrari, and possibly no serious speed involved.

But it sure is a famous video and it has inspired a lot of secondary uses of the original film as well as copy cats.

You can read more than you probably want to know by checking Wikipedia under that French title or just googling "claude lelouch paris video".

Gary