I'm baffled that Perl beats C in anything. How could it, given that perl is written in C?

A perl program can (in some cases) beat a C program for the same task given the same amount of programmer effort, because there are optimisations built into the C code for perl that encapsulate more effort than you'd normally ever consider worthwhile for a single application.

Given unbounded effort, the C program will always at least match the perl program. Few people or organisations have the resources for that, though.