Rico's father's friend
John and his lovely wife are in
Paris, and his blog,
The Peripatetic Engineer, has a
post about it:
Saw a car (photo) on Rue Buci in Paris on Sunday. It's a Facel III. FACEL was a French sheet metal stamping company that went into the automobile business in 1954; FACEL stands for Forges et Ateliers de Construction d'Eure-et-Loir. This was their sports car version. It had a 1.6 liter four-cylinder DOHC engine. The cam shafts on this engine had only two bearings each; the engine manufacturer was being innovative and used special steel instead of adding bearings. Unfortunately, the cam flexed too much, the engine lost timing, and broke. A new CEO tried to fix it by replacing the bad engines with Volvo power plants, but it was too late. The company went belly up in 1964.
Prominent owners included Ava Gardner, Joan Collins, and Ringo Starr. Pixar put one in the movie Ratatouille.
Rico says he'd always heard it referred to as a
Facel Vega:
No comments:
Post a Comment