WRC Croatia - The First 4 Years - Hrvoje Mihajlic Photography

It’s hard to explain rally to someone who doesn’t get it.
Waking up at 5 a.m., driving for a couple of hours, then hiking for at least another hour through fields, forests, and bushes—just to find a spot behind a tree. And then… you wait. For hours. Waiting for a dozen WRC cars that blast past you in a split second.

So what’s so fascinating about WRC cars?
They’re cars you could technically see on the road—just with a few hundred extra horsepower. But they still have to behave like road cars, obey traffic rules, and actually drive between stages. That’s how they get to the so-called special stages, where the real action happens and times are measured. Because of that, a rally itinerary can easily exceed a thousand kilometers, with only a few hundred of those being competitive stages. Everyone is racing against the clock—and the fastest one wins.

As a kid, I used to watch generations of madmen on Eurosport—from Kankkunen to Loeb—never imagining that one day the World Rally Championship would come to Croatia. And not just once, but four years in a row.
Legend has it that for 2025, one of the counties failed to submit some paperwork, which meant we couldn’t even apply. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised. But at this point, it doesn’t really matter—because disappearing for a full day while my wife is very pregnant would be even harder to justify than cutting our honeymoon short for this same event two years earlier.

This is my little archive of moments I managed to capture over those first four years.
Enjoy.