A Practical Guide to Exhibiting at Rétromobile
Rétromobile 2027 is the 51st edition of the show and runs from Wednesday 3 to Sunday 7 February 2027 at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, organised by Comexposium. It has been running since February 1976, when the first edition was held in the old Gare de la Bastille, and it has been at Porte de Versailles since 1981. The 2026 edition marked fifty years.
Two things about the 2027 dates are worth pinning down before anything else. First, the show has moved: the 2026 edition ran from 28 January to 1 February, and 2027 sits about a week later. Every organiser and venue deadline is anchored to the show dates rather than to a calendar week, so a schedule copied from last year is a schedule that is out by roughly seven days. Second, the daily opening hours for 2027 have not been published at the time of writing — the organiser's practical-information page still displays the January 2026 times. If you see 2027 hours quoted confidently anywhere, they are almost certainly last year's, and we would not plan a staffing rota against them.
This Is a Public Show, and That Changes the Brief
Rétromobile is not a three-day business-to-business fair with a badge scan at the door. It runs five days, Wednesday through Sunday, and it is open to the public as well as to the trade. Two of those days are a weekend. That single structural fact reshapes almost every practical decision you will make.
Your audience is mixed and it changes through the week. The earlier days skew towards dealers, restorers, club officials, auction bidders and press; the weekend brings families, enthusiasts and a great many people who will never buy a car from you but will remember your marque. Both are worth having and they want different things. A rota that puts your senior specialists on the floor on Wednesday and Thursday, and your best explainers on Saturday and Sunday, gets more out of the same headcount than one that grinds everybody through all five days.
The specification changes too. Five days of public contact is hard on a stand in ways three days of trade visitors are not. Corners get knocked, surfaces get touched, and anything at hand height needs to look acceptable on Sunday afternoon rather than only in the day-one photographs. Where visitors are meant to stop needs to be designed rather than left to goodwill — a barrier, a floor change, or simply enough distance that nobody has to make a decision about it.
What French Fire Rules Require of a Car on a Stand
Exhibition halls in France sit under a specific fire safety regulation as type T establishments, and vehicles on display fall under Article T41 of it. The requirement is direct: fuel tanks of engines shown at rest must be emptied or fitted with locking caps, and battery terminals must be protected so that they are inaccessible. Anything running has to be declared in advance to the organiser and the safety commission, and combustion gases have to be vented outside the hall. Everything on display has to be stabilised so it cannot tip.
This is not a formality to be handled by somebody else at the end. It shapes the design. A car with covered battery terminals is an electrically dead object, so any light in the cabin, under the bonnet or in the engine bay has to be fed from the stand and planned into the electrical layout at the same time as the walls. A car with a drained tank is not going to reposition itself if the layout turns out to be a few centimetres wrong, so the position has to be right the first time. And because the vehicle cannot move once it is placed, the route in and the route out have to be designed as part of the stand rather than discovered on build-up morning.
The organiser carries obligations of its own here — the regulation requires a qualified safety officer to be appointed for the event, and stand documentation goes through that route with its own deadlines. What that means for you is simply that the paperwork chain starts earlier than most exhibitors expect and is not negotiable at the end of it. We handle the stand-side submissions as part of the project.
Getting the Vehicle In, Up, and Out Again
Porte de Versailles states as a matter of course that trucks and passenger vehicles are not permitted inside the pavilions and that only handling equipment is. Rétromobile plainly operates a derogation from that, since the show is made of cars, but it does so through a controlled vehicle-movement schedule published in the exhibitor manual — a slot, in other words, rather than an access right. Plan the arrival around the slot you are given, not around when your transporter would prefer to be there.
Then there is the vehicle itself. A car that runs can be driven to position under supervision. A car that does not run needs a crew, and skates or dollies, and those get booked in advance rather than found on the morning. Ground clearance is the detail that catches people out most often: a pre-war chassis, a lowered competition car or anything with a deep front valance has a few centimetres to play with, and every threshold plate, ramp lip and floor transition on the route is a potential contact point. We ask for clearance, kerb weight, wheelbase and whether the car runs, before we draw a single wall.
The pavilion allocation adds a layer. Pavilion 7 is a multi-level building — 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 stacked beneath the convention centre — while Pavilion 4 is a single level. A ground-floor position makes vehicle access a routing question. An upper-floor position makes it a goods-lift question and a floor-loading question simultaneously, and both need answering before the structure is committed. Dismantle windows also differ by pavilion at this venue, so a crew working to one site-wide closing time will be wrong somewhere.
Designing Around a Car Rather Than Around a Message
The most useful thing we can tell a first-time Rétromobile exhibitor is that the stand should be quieter than the one you would build at a technology fair, and that this is not a budget compromise. The exhibit here is an object people came specifically to look at. A large illuminated graphic wall behind a 1930s coupé does not amplify the car; it argues with it, and the car loses in photographs while the graphic reads as advertising.
What works instead is a set of small decisions. Floor tone that sits under the paintwork rather than competing with it — mid-neutral almost always beats either white or black. A clean sightline down the flank of the car from the main aisle, which usually means resisting the urge to put a counter where the view is. Plinth height low enough that the roofline stays around eye level, because a car lifted too high stops reading as a car and starts reading as a display item. And lighting placed to model the body — raking across the flank to show the line, rather than flooding from directly above, which flattens everything.
Colour temperature is worth more attention here than on any other stand we build. Cold white light makes warm reds and metallics look synthetic, and it does unkind things to chrome and to old leather. Warmer, more directional light costs no more and is the single change that most improves how a heritage vehicle photographs on a stand. If your budget is finite, we would rather spend it on the lighting and the floor than on more wall.
The Auction Week Around the Show
Rétromobile is the opening fixture of the collector-car year and the anchor of a broader Paris auction week, and floor traffic through the show responds to what is happening in the sale room. It matters for planning even if you are not consigning anything.
The official show auction changed hands recently. Gooding Christie's took the official position from the 2026 edition under a multi-year agreement, replacing Artcurial, which had held it for many years; in 2026 the sale room sat in Pavilion 7.1. Artcurial, Bonhams and RM Sotheby's continue to run their own Paris sales in the same week, away from the official slot. A large share of visitor guides and stand-builder pages still describe Artcurial as the show's auction, which is a useful test: if a page has that wrong, treat its dates and deadlines with the same suspicion.
One more thing worth stating plainly. We are not going to publish a visitor or exhibitor figure for this show. The numbers circulating online range from around 120,000 to around 182,000 visitors and from roughly 430 to 620 exhibitors, attributed to overlapping years, and none of them traces back to a Comexposium statement we can point at. Sizing a stand or a staffing rota against a number nobody can source is worse than sizing it against your own segment and your own last edition, which is what we would recommend doing.
Building From Frankfurt, Showing in Paris
Our workshop is in Frankfurt and Porte de Versailles is roughly 570 kilometres away by road — a straightforward domestic-style run inside the single market, with no border formality and no customs file. We build and dry-assemble the whole structure on our own floor, photograph it standing for your approval, then dismantle, load and drive it to Paris. Problems get found in a workshop with tools and spare material rather than in a hall on a build-up deadline with a car arriving in ninety minutes.
That separation is particularly worth having at this show. Vehicles frequently arrive from outside the EU on carnets, and vehicle paperwork has a habit of running late. If the stand is a separate consignment on its own intra-EU journey, a delayed car is a bad afternoon rather than a cancelled stand — you still have a finished space, and you are negotiating about what goes on it rather than about whether you have anything at all.
Because Rétromobile is annual, reuse tends to pay here faster than at a biennial show. We keep structures in storage in Frankfurt between editions for clients who want them, so the following February costs a graphics refresh and freight rather than a full rebuild. For a club or a dealer who exhibits every year with a different headline car, that is usually the sensible pattern — the frame stays, the story changes.
Because Rétromobile runs every year, a reusable system frame tends to pay for itself faster here than at a biennial show — the structure stays in our Frankfurt warehouse between editions and the next February costs a graphics refresh and freight rather than a rebuild. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern.
