This is a loaded question, principally because the reader may not have a Facel, and secondly because I did drive my Facel 11 today! Driving the car is no big deal on New Years Day, but it’s part of a tradition of New Year/Hogmany involving something called First Footing which means being the first person…

The former Facel 11 demonstrator, chassis number HK2 A114, sold for £50,000 plus £7,500 buyer’s premium at Hendon on December 10. This was in spite of a reserve of £60-70,000, but it still sold. As you will see in the description below, the car needed quite a lot of work, in fact a full restoration…

I wasn’t actually going to post anything for a little while, but I’m back in the UK and leafing through Classic and Sports Car I found a French company selling windscreens and using an HK500 as their chosen marque to illustrate their wares. The company is basically part of the Europarts empire but I think…

In spite of the fact that I seem to have been travelling for weeks – actually I have been travelling for weeks – I’ve managed to keep in touch with the World of Facel Vegas and what with one or two private messages and the odd trawl through the internet, I can confidently say that…

Bonhams are offering arguably the most famous Facel 11 in Britain at their December 10 sale at Hendon RAF Museum. Being the former Intercontinental Cars demonstrator and press car, chassis number A114 was seen in and described by every newspaper and motoring magazine that tested it, most notably Autocar and Motor. Indeed, I wanted to…

It’s not often that there is an entire article about restoring a Facel Vega but this month’s Classic Cars (November, issue 508) has exactly that. To its credit, the magazine publishes seven pages of a project by Hans Ruhe’s Amicale Facel Holland to restore an HK500 including interviews with the principal workers in the project.…

Managing a major restoration First of all, an apology for not posting for some time. Since mid-August, I have been to the Belgian Grand Prix, followed a week later by the World Endurance round at the Nurburgring, then the Italian Grand Prix, followed by the Goodwood Revival. Then I flew to Singapore for that GP…

  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…

Anyone who has owned any Facel Vega will appreciate that the number of seats advertised is incidental to the truth and practicability of those seats. Try and fit a person in the back of a Facellia, for instance, and he or she will have to lie lengthways. It’s virtually the same with a Facel 11;…

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…