How fast? Faulty speed camera clocks Ford Focus at 703 km/h

In a case of dramatic over speeding with a bizarre outcome, a driver in Italy found herself on the receiving end of a €850 (R16 207) fine after being clocked at 703 km/h in her Ford Focus.

According to Autoapassionati, the incident happened earlier this week outside the city of Ancona, some 280 km/h from the capital Rome in the province of Offagna, with a faulty speed camera being blamed for the readout that resulted in the Focus being 633 km/h over the imposed limit and a mere 525 km/h behind the current land speed record set by former Royal Air Force pilot, Andy Green, behind the wheel of Thrust SSC in 1997.

Even more incredibly was the failure of the local police to verify the data accordingly, with the publication reporting it went ahead with not only issuing the fine, but slapping the unnamed woman’s licence with 10 penalty points in addition to not revealing the actual speed to her.

In yet another twist, a spokesperson for the region’s highway department, Giovanni Strologo, who once served as an Ancona city councillor, advised the driver to pay the fine but appeal for compensation on account of police negligence. According to Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport, Strologo had been campaigning for authorities to drop the current speed camera measuring system known as Autovelox, due to it coming up with often inaccurate readouts.

The lastest faux pas comes over two years after a driver in Belgium was clocked doing 696 km/h in a 50 km/h zone in an Opel Astra near the town of Quiévrain. Fined €6 597 (R125 788), the driver, unsurprisingly, contested the fine, but was  hit with a much smaller amount after proper checks revealed that he was in fact 10 km/h over the limit as opposed to 646 km/h.

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