The ringing in the ears afterwards
01/31/2026
Do you know that ringing in your ears, maybe it's even a tinitus-like whistling? You can hear it particularly well when you have finally arrived home after an eventful day and are reviewing the day.
After a day at the trade fair, this moment is particularly intense. The impressions are still very fresh, the bright colors still stand out before their eyes as soon as they close them. My Rétromobile is already passé again. The plane has brought me back to Zurich with a 20-minute early landing. With a flight time of 55 minutes, you wonder how strong the tailwind must have been. But that's not the point.
A premature conclusion drawn on the Friday evening of the trade fair, while it is still running until Sunday, is the fact that the big star, which thousands of visitors passed by, was a rail vehicle at the 50th Rétromobile. The Bugatti Autorail seems to have a very special magic for car fans. Perhaps even more so than for rail enthusiasts, because for them the light railcar from Molsheim is little more than a standard-gauge streetcar with a slightly higher top speed.
For car fans, however, it is fascinating to imagine that it was used to transport farmers, schoolchildren and ordinary citizens from A to B, powered by four Bugatti Royale engines. For me as a Swiss citizen, this is a bit like the Alfa Romeo post buses that were used in a small series for the Swiss Post and some transport companies after the Second World War, because the domestic commercial vehicle industry was unable to meet demand by building new vehicles at the back and front. So the average Swiss citizen was allowed to drive an Alfa Romeo to the Bremgartenring in Bern for little money and watch a car of exactly the same make win a Grand Prix on the racetrack.
Left: An Alfa Romeo 430A/1 from the Zurich Oberland VZO transport company from 1948. In France, the Bugatti drove on the track; in Switzerland, the Grand Prix winner's car drove on the road for the people. Image: ETH e-pics
The picture of the Bugatti front axles in various states of preservation at the corresponding parts dealer is just as crazy and hard to forget. About a handful were neatly displayed on an extra holder. I remember the stories told by Bugatti specialist Martin Pfrunder about how he strolled around the factory premises in Molsheim in the early 1960s while he was having his car maintained and serviced there and came across axles like these lying on a crossbar in the grass under the open sky. I didn't even want to ask how much these axles, which are very attractive even as simple objects, cost at the Rétromobile.
Axel Schütte showed us a Talbot Lago, which - with its folding mudguards and classic opening hood - looked something like one of the specimens shown in the exhibition "Body Worlds" exhibition, in which some kind of torso was opened up to show the inside, an eerie yet fascinating aesthetic.
And, as I slowly backtracked, the image of a small, cylindrical lamp that had been fixed in my mind's eye kept haunting me. I was looking for one just like it. It consists of a kind of button that you pull out of the dashboard and which simultaneously closes the contact that keeps a light bulb burning. These were once used to illuminate dashboards, but also to enable the passenger to read the map without dazzling the driver. I finally discovered a single one, but the rather shabby thing was three times too expensive.
The realization remains that such trade fairs are not necessarily conducive to targeted searches, but on the other hand you always come across things that catch you cold, fascinate you and that you bring home with you - whether materially packed in a bag or immaterially burned in your memory. For me this year, after a few models on the first day, there were even more models on the last day. Fortunately only miniature cars, it could have been a real car! Or a model for the price of a real car, like the wonderful Tatra T77 found in the forest by a true artist - for 30,000 euros.
