Retromobile 2026: Can You Guess These Icons From the 'World's Best Classic Car Meet'?
Retro (https://www.topgear.com/car-news/retro)
As the French show celebrates its 50th anniversary, Top Gear has set you a little task...
Published: 30 Jan 2026
Retromobile in Paris is often called the world's best classic car meeting. It's not all gloss, and it's not track-based. Its superpower is its breathtaking range. Secondhand spares for rusty 1960s Renaults? Plenty. Absolute top-end hypercars? Got you covered there.
This year is its 50th anniversary. It's evolving. It used to have more of an auto-jumble vibe. These days the manufacturers and high-end dealers and auction houses have moved in.
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So VW had a collection of Golf GTIs to mark its 50th anniversary, beside a disguised electric ID Polo GTI. Peugeot had a set of 205 GTIs – including the T16 homologation car – as a heritage buttress to the new 208 GTI electric. You're sensing a theme there.
Photography: Paul Horrell
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Citroen brought a terrific lineup of its consequential concept cars including the prototype 2CV. BMW showed all the Le Mans art cars. Yes, they really did get artists as pre-eminent as Andy Warhol to paint these automotive canvasses, then put them through 24 hours of heat and wet at full race speed.
Surrounding the manufacturer exhibits you've got the delights of ultra-specialist spares dealers. Tables stacked high with restoration parts: lamps, speedos, trim, hoses, fuel pumps, chrome bits, manuals. Oh and model cars: Zut do the French like their models.
Sounds daft to say it but the kinds of cars I want to see at Retromobile are the everyday French hatches of my youth. They're now far scarcer than the supercars of their era. The attrition rate of the Citroen BX, asymptotic to 100 per cent, matches the survival rate of the Ferrari 288 GTO.
So it was a joy to wander the hall reserved for classic dealers and their sub-€30,000 cars. There was a BX, and indeed a CX, but sadly no GS. Still, a couple of Renault Fuegos and a 12 estate made up for that. No pleasure guiltier.
The theatrically lit, flawlessly polished ranks of the premier-league dealer stands seemed oddly routine after that. Sure there's pleasure in a McLaren F1 Longtail or a Bugatti Centodieci or a lineup of all the Ferrari limited-run hypercars from 288 GTO to LaFerrari. But you can see them many times a year at events like the Goodwood FoS and Blenheim Salon Prive.
Anyway, the most jaw-dropping of the Bugattis at this year's Retromobile wasn't a Type 35 or the Centodici or the many Veyrons. It was the train. Ettore Bugatti's toppermost car, the 1927 Royale, was a sales flop. So he designed a railcar to use the remaining 12.7-litre engines. It was a revolution – dramatically faster, smoother and cleaner than the steam engines of its day. The French national railway used them into the mid-50s, and it was extremely influential in train design since. How they craned it into the exhibition hall I've no idea, but the crowds loved it.
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