My monthly trawl through various publications hasn’t revealed much of late – apart from the usual classifieds – but this month’s Classic and Sports Car is of more interest than usual. At first, I thought editorial Facel Vega mentions were going to outweigh the usual ads, but that hasn’t been the case and in fact there are some interesting and new advertisements for cars.

At first, though, you only have to get to page 12 for the first mention and a pic of a pair of Facellias that appeared at the Concours d’LeMons during Monterey week in California. This event is for the oddball, mundane and truly awful, created as an antidote to Pebble Beach.

One of the two cars was owned by Dana Shatts who explained that the car had done 240,000 miles, thanks to an engine change. “The original engine had all the durability of a potato chip, so Dad soon replaced it with a Volvo unit,” said Shatts who had come up from the Los Angeles region with well-known Facel expert Mark Morgan in the second Facellia.

Four pages later is a pic of a ‘fantastic 1960 Excellence’ displayed at the Schloss Dyck classic day near Dusseldorf in Germany. In the text, it is revealed that there were more than one Facel at the event which took place over three days at the end of July.

There are some superb cars advertised from many different sources – not all regular advertisers – and the first Facel is to be found opposite Simon Taylor’s regular column. Simon’s an old friend of mine and interested in Facels – as he is in all cars – so he will approve of the full page ad from lap63 in Holland Park, London for an LHD HK500 described as a barn find but a complete three owner example in pale blue. Lap63 is run by expat Frenchman Ludovic Parayre and the car was found in France.

As I say, the ad pages are fantastic and it makes you wonder just how many old cars are actually for sale worldwide. Much later, we come across Justin Banks’s two RHD cars, the Excellence for £49,995 and the Facellia for £29,995. A few pages later is an RHD HK500 being sold by the Ascott collection in France. This is HK-1 CE7, originally bought by Ernest Doe of Essex and exported around 1990. It has also been in Switzerland but sensibly, is being offered in the UK as it’s RHD.

And finally, hidden in the classifieds, is a three line ad for a 1959 Excellence for £125,000, presumably in good nick. It looks as though it’s LHD and is located in Austria. All in all, a pretty good haul of cars.

Ends