A sequel to one of the greatest automotive films.
Although there will be no F1 race in Monaco this weekend, because the 2020 Monaco Grand Prix was canceled due to the recent COVID-19 events, there will still be the shriek of a Ferrari on the streets of this hallowed circuit. Ferrari is planning to film a sequel to one of the great car films of all time, “C'était Un Rendez-Vous”, on the street circuit at Monaco, which represents the first French file shoot since the start of the pandemic lockdown.
Ferrari F1 driver Charles Leclerc will drive the new SF90 hybrid supercar on the closed F1 circuit at Monaco. The SF90 is Ferrari’s latest engineering marvel and represents the brand’s first mass-produced hybridized product. Seeing Leclerc behind the wheel at an empty Monaco will certainly be an interesting sight.
If you’re not familiar with the brilliant “C'était Un Rendez-Vous” film, it's time to take 8 minutes to watch this sensational footage. Filmmaker Claude Lelouch wanted to shoot a film of a high speed drive through Paris featuring many of the city's famous landmarks in the process. Claude asked the French government to close down the roads so he could shoot his film, but his request was denied. This did not stop Claude who decided to make his film anyway starting his high speed run through the city early one August morning when many of Paris’s population was on summer break.
To create this film, Claude did not have a quiver of GoPros and friends with drones instead, he strapped a 35mm camera to the front bumper of his Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9. This unstabilized raw footage captures a unique moment in Paris during a highly illegal drive through the virtually deserted city. Only two people knew about Claude’s planned run, his first assist, and his girlfriend. Right before he set off, Calude called his girlfriend and told her to be at Sacré-Cœur in 10 minutes to appear in the film.
How does Ferrari fit into all of this? Well to add to the drama of the film, Claude dubbed over the audio with sounds from his Ferrari 275GTB. Since you cannot see the subject, it’s easy to assume it was really a Ferrari tearing through the streets of Paris that brisk morning in August of 1976.
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We’re excited to see this new film and hope that even with modern cameras the raw nature of the original will shine through. When there’s a Ferrari driving through a closed Monaco it’s hard to mess that up.
Maranello 22 May 2020
SF90 Stradale and Charles Leclerc protagonists in a unique short film to be shot in the Monaco Principality on what was to be one of F1’s major calendar events.
Some appointments in the calendar cannot be forgotten. Even under the most difficult of circumstances, they cry out to be honoured and transformed into an opportunity, to create something truly unique and memorable. With this in mind on Sunday morning, on the day that the Formula 1 Grand Prix was to take place in the Monaco Principality but suspended due to the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic (the last time an F1 Grand Prix in Monaco didn’t take place was in 1954) Claude Lelouch will shoot a new short film “Le Grand Rendez-Vous” with Charles Leclerc, inspired by his famous “C'était Un Rendez-Vous” filmed in 1976.
The protagonists this time will be theFerrari SF90 Stradal, the Prancing Horse’s first series production hybrid model, and the Monegasque talent, who will take Ferrari’s new entry on a first breathtaking drive through the Principality’s winding streets and roads. The new short evokes both the atmosphere of the beloved Grand Prix and the roar of the Ferrari 275 GTB that provided the instantly recognisable soundtrack to the 1976 film shot in Paris.
On the city circuit the SF90 Stradale will measure its unmatched performance for a Ferrari production car: 1,000 cv, a weight-to-power ratio of 1.57 kg/cv, and 390 kg of downforce at 250 km/h. The car’s name, a reference to the 90th anniversary of Scuderia Ferrari celebrated last year, exemplifies the symbiosis of transferred technology between Ferrari road and track cars, of which this recent model is the maximum expression.
This first post lockdown French shoot symbolically will also mark the start of a gradual return to the ‘new normal’ after the pandemic and the restart for the film industry, impacted significantly by recent restrictions.
Ferrari welcomed partnership in the film as a way of demonstrating support for its tifosi, clients and supporters as an expression of hope that the world will gradually be able to absorb the painful and complex health crisis which has affected everyone, allowing us to begin to look positively towards the future, also in anticipation of the expected restart of the F1 season in July.
In the same spirit, over the past months, the Maranello marque has continued to demonstrate its commitment to fighting the Covid-19 crisis through concrete support ranging from fundraisers, to the distribution of healthcare equipment to hospitals, to the production of respiratory conversion valves at the Maranello factory, to the most recent expression of transfer technology represented in the design of a new pulmonary ventilator, FI5, offered in open source production at global level.