Brief History

The most famous rally in the territory of the present-day Czech Republic, Rally Vltava was founded in 1960 by four drivers from the Benzina Prague
Automobile Club: Viktor Mráz, Alois Rieger, Ladislav Branda and Zdeněk Treybal. All of them were very experienced automotive experts, including
experience in motorsports, especially the last named, who won the 1948 Rajd Polski event in a factory Bristol 400 and finished 3rd in the 1949 Monte
Carlo Rally.

They set themselves the goal of bringing the Rallye Vltava into the European Championship series, which they then succeeded in doing at the FIA
autumn congress in Paris in 1964, mainly thanks to their personal friend Louis Chiron. The first Rallye Vltava included in the European Championship
series was then held from 5 to 7 July 1965 and its centre was Liberec in northern Bohemia.

From its first year, the Vltava Rally has gained great recognition not only in Czechoslovakia, but since 1965 also abroad, especially for its proverbial
first-class organization and extraordinary difficulty, which forever made it the toughest automobile competition in Czechoslovakia and one of the
toughest competitions in Europe at that time!

For example, in 1966 its route reached a length of 2,552 kilometers, which had to be overcome in two days and two nights, non-stop driving through all
the mountainous terrain around the entire Czech basin, with a rest period lasting only 1:21 hours! Nighttime average speeds between time controls in
many years reached values exceeding 90 km/h, regardless of frequent fog and cloudbursts! The longest special stage was in 1964; it measured 43.5
km! In 1973 there were 46 special stages, but none were repeated!

Complete factory teams from Lancia, BMC, Ford, SAAB, Renault, Opel, Škoda, Tatra, Wartburg, Trabant, Moskvich and Volga, as well as prominent
individuals supported by car manufacturers Steyr-Puch, Porsche, BMW, Glas, NSU and others, competed against each other.

And it was the Vltava Rally that, as the very first automobile sports discipline in the then Czechoslovakia, opened the way to the FIA European
Championship series and other automobile sports disciplines in the following years.