Donovan and Facel Vega

Cars in music are everywhere. Perhaps one of the best known is Janis Joplin’s ‘Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all have Porsches, I must make amends Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends So Lord won’t you buy me, a Mercedes Benz?’ Fact is that in…

HK500 discovered

The discovery of a car thought to be lost is always a momentous occasion, and this is the case of the right hand drive HK500 chassis number G8 which has appeared for sale in the States, offered by Hyman Ltd of St Louis, Missouri. The manual car was originally sold in the UK in late…

Facel tragedy

The scene above is the result of a tragic fire in France a couple of weeks ago which has destroyed two right hand drive Facel Vegas and left the owner seriously ill in hospital. It took place around 340 kilometers south of Paris on a very hot day and has left the Facel 11 and …

Update

What with various motor racing commitments and research for the upcoming Le Mans 24 hrs, I seem to have been a little lax in my Facel Vega work, even if I have updated various things recently, including a list of articles that have appeared on e-Bay. But things are rarely completely static on the Facel…

Classified – e-Bay

End of May e-Bay summary There are 17 pages of items listed under Facel Vega on e-Bay as I write this at the end of May. Most of them are the usual models, magazine articles, Fred Hobbs books, road test reprints, the occasional badge, even clocks and mugs, the kind of stuff that’s on there…

Not Ava’s

  The picture of Ava Gardner walking away from her HK500 is one cherished by all Facel owners, but it’s not all that it seems. A wonderful bit of super sleuthing by Robert Gel on the French site has uncovered the real story behind the pic.  He writes: ‘Yes, it’s an HK500, no doubt but…

A Tale of two twos From Crawley

A tale of two twos from Crawley Headline writers are obscure people, aren’t they? I suppose I must include myself in that description, therefore, for the above. But basically this is about two Facel 11s which both began life in Crawley in West Sussex, GB,  or nearby. The first was originally owned by Jack Bowthorpe…

Press Watch

I’ve been leafing through the May Classic and Sports Car and it looks like the only mentions of Facels are in ads, but there’s a few of them and some might be of interest. The first is the Thiesen advertisement on page 50, right at the start of the big display ads, and the German…

Ex-Trintignant FV3B for sale at JD Classics

FVCC member Adam Sherring has told me that the ex-Maurice Trintignant Facel Vega FV3B is currently for sale in the UK at the top quality JD Classics dealership. This car was only recently sold at Retromobile by Artcurial for a price quoted in Classic & Sports Car at £149,872, but according to Adam it is…