Postcard from Rétromobile

By then Rétromobile had already moved, in 1981, to the Porte de Versailles, a convention centre located between the Boulevards of the Marshals and the Boulevard Périphérique. For automotive journalists this venue is also the sprawling home of the biennial Paris motor show, or Salon de L’Automobile, which causes some dread among our lot because it has no soul and is a permanent building site; yet Rétromobile still manages to cling to la différence.

‘Not just a motor show, it was an idea: that the motor car deserved a place in our cultural heritage,’ said Rétromobile co-founder Marc Nicolosi.

On his first acquaintance Jean Todt, former head of the FIA and one of the people who masterminded the Michael Schumacher era of F1 dominance at Ferrari, observed that ‘everything smells of oil, memory and passion,’ in much the way our former Queen must have wondered why everywhere she went smelled of fresh paint.

‘It’s our Proust’s madeleine,’ said one visitor. ‘It brings back the cars of our childhood, but also the dreams we have never stopped pursuing.’ Bit deep for me, that one.

Yet the show has managed (mostly) to eschew the rank mercantilism of the now fast-disappearing common-or-garden motor show. For while the show halls are the same, the stands aren’t filled with identical cars in different hues and there are no chief executives drenched in business testosterone like a teenager in Lynx Africa.

For the classic car exhibitors, the stand rents were more budget friendly, the food stands more toothsome and after the financial scares of 2008 and the Covid pandemic which put paid to Rétromobile in 2021, people flooded back to see the spectacle with visitor numbers well over 100,000. The first auction was held in 1993 and this year saw new sponsor Goodings waving its gavels at a well-stuffed catalogue of classics. Times might be tough in the classic car racket right now, but that just seems to attract more folk.

It seemed sad that the less glitzy cars were banished to the dimly-lit proletarianism of Hall 4, where MGs, Fiats and Fords rubbed wings in the gloom, where more ordinary folk appreciated the cars without trophy wives on Manolos and not wearing those weird dress shirts with collars that appear to stand up on their own.

My favourite? Apart from the simply breathtaking 1948 Figoni et Falaschi Talbot-Lago T26 Grand Sport, my heart went out to Francine, a 1943 Willys Jeep without the usual fake carbines, but with a whiff of battle nonetheless. Over 45,000km on the clock is a lot of distance to put in on those vestigial seats, but I could see it parked at my local in St Mabyn with one cleated tyre on the kerb and Herbie’s blanket in the back. My grandfather made an epic journey in one of these through liberated France to Paris during World War Two, which I want to reenact and write about sometime. I’ll nag our editors… (no need, we’ll take it – AF)

Ironies? You betcha. The manufacturers with their expansive stands and wonderful displays of historique vehicles are taking over a bit; Rétromobile doesn’t need wall-to-wall carpet, aggrandising speeches, or designer nibbles.

What’s more, comparisons are odious. As one colleague put it: ‘some of these cars you could put in a new showroom and they’d walk out of the door’ – unlike quite a lot of today’s dull-as-ditchwater SUVs.

Peugeot was pushing its new all-electric 208 GTI slated for this year and produced a mouth-watering display of former scorching hatchbacks, or as one news channel put it: ‘La bombinette mythique’…

Citroën, with more right than most to be at a classic car show, bought some of its cars from the old Conservatoire museum, which is still stuck in the limbo of where and if it will move and when.

Trevor Fiore’s 1980 Karin concept introduced the three abreast, central driving position of the McLaren F1, or in the case of the former quality, the Matra Bagheera (as they say, everything that goes around comes around). There was André Lefebvre’s fantastical C10 of 1956, aka The Drop Of Water, proving the rear-engined idea and monospace concept just as well as the similarly-dated Fiat 600 Multipla – or the Crossley Burney Streamliner for that matter.

We were also shown the ELO concept, last year’s revival of the monospace idea, which gives the notion that Rétromobile is just a chance for mainline manufacturers to rehash last year’s ideas for a more willing audience.

To be fair and apart from that lurid 1970s orange cabin, this was an interesting take on modern family motoring, though it bore more than a striking resemblance to a scaled-down version of Ettore Bugatti’s 40-tonne Royale-engined Autorail. You could also see where the inspiration for the central driving position, the six seats with two demountable beds and lava lamp came from. I might have lied about the lava lamp, but sitting inside that car still felt like some drug-fuelled dream sequence from a Lindsay Anderson movie.

Biggest irony, of course, is that this is a classic car show to which you can’t actually drive a classic car. Under Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, cars have been hunted down and fined in The City of Light. Classics can’t claim a Crit Air sticker, nor get derogation because of their age.

‘You can come in on Sunday, but you need to be out then, too,’ said a spokesman for the French Federation.

‘It’s all in a state of change,’ said a spokesman for FIVA. ‘Like most of France, it’s political. We want to be good citizens, but we want to drive our cars.’

Most classic car owners would be inclined to busk it and drive – that was certainly the text from the classic car clubs – but we rosbifs like to be legal, too.

I came to Rétromobile 15 years ago with my daughter as punters and we both loved it. This year I felt the yellow-glowing lamps of Rétromobile’s old spirit were fast receding in the rear view mirrors. Like the old Gare de la Bastille, there’s a danger that the organisers don’t realise what they got until it’s gone.

Sadly for those now wondering whether to head to St Pancras tout de suite, I’m rather afraid to say it ended yesterday (Sunday). Still, all the more time to plan for next year…