Quel scandale! In response to my item last week about Claude Lelouch’s classic short film C’etait un rendezvous, my friend Peter Dizikes has provided the following smackdown of the widely reported claim that the car sustained a speed of 140 miles per hour for some or most of the film:

I decided to do a little research for you on the Claude Lelouch film, along with a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

As you mentioned, it is said the driver of the car, whoever it was, hit speeds of up to 140 mph driving through Paris. Sounds pretty fast, right? I decided to test this claim.

The distance from the point where you turn onto the Avenue Foch from the Bois de Boulogne, to the point where the Champs Elysees feeds into the Place de la Concorde, is right about 2.25 miles. Yes, I’m including the curve around the Arc de Triomphe. By my count, the car covers this distance in 1:50 in the film, from the 0:44 mark to the 2:34 mark.

That averages out to about 74 miles per hour. So the car was going fast, but it’s just about impossible it could have been going 140 at any point. Moreover, this is the part of the route most conducive to driving at high speeds, so the car could not have been going faster later in the film, which is also obvious from watching it. A more likely high speed would thus be in the 80s — almost as fast as Princess Di’s driver supposedly was going when they crashed in the underpass at the Place d’ Alma in 1997, of course.

Aren’t you glad I took the time to figure this out?

Others have apparently come to a similar conclusion. I just noticed that the C’etait un rendezvous page on Wikipedia contains the following passage:

Calculations made by several independent groups showed that the car never exceeded 140 km/h (85 mph), Lelouch himself cited that the top speed achieved was 200 km/h.

Comments from Lelouch prove that the vehicle that carried the camera was his 6.9L Mercedes-Benz, with automatic transmission and a top speed of 230 km/h. The gear changes up into 5th and high-revving engine sounds indicate speeds of well over 200 km/h, yet the picture often does not match, as visual speed does not change as much as the sound does. This is due to the fact that the sound track was dubbed with the sound from a Ferrari 275GTB to give the impression of much higher speeds, as confirmed by Lelouch.

I’m not sure if this passage is accurate; at the very least, “comments from Lelouch” do not “prove” anything. But the Wikipedia page does include a link to this photo of Lelouch playing with a camera attached to the front of a Mercedes: