Since I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with machines that make noise and go fast – making rally driving my obvious favorite sport. I was born in Athens, Greece, and grew up on a tiny island called Salamina, just 15 minutes from the city by ferry.
My very first memory is being carried on my father’s shoulders up to the rocky mountains of Athens for the Acropolis Rally of 2000.
My father, Ioannis Argitis, lived in Salamina and served as an officer in the Hellenic Navy for 25 years. Like many only children, my father’s sole form of entertainment growing up in the 1970s was playing with toys. He would play out scenarios with die-cast model cars, rearranging them in different positions to resemble the scenes pictured in automotive magazines.
“My eyes were constantly focused on cars: what everyday drivers looked like inside of them; what made them move,” my dad tells me when I ask him about the roots of his obsession. “My father was not a car person – he didn’t even have a driver’s license,” he says. “I couldn’t afford a car at the time, so my friends and I would study the ones parked in our neighborhood and buy cheap magazines as we imagined what it would feel like to drive a car.”
As an adult, his fascination with automobiles took a different turn when he discovered motorsport. From then on he began following Formula One and the World Rally Championship (WRC) through television broadcasts.
“In 1996, I traveled to the Town of Lamia, five hours away from home, for my first Acropolis Rally. It was love at first sight,” my dad recalls. “Nothing in Greece was tailored for car enthusiasts at the time. WRC opened an avenue of passion that I never let go.”
By 1997, my father had been married to my mother, Fotini, for four years and had finished his 10th year as a Navy officer. I was born a year later. According to my father, I was a curly-haired 2-year-old when he brought me along to the annual Acropolis Rally of Greece. Strapped with a Hot Wheels™ backpack full of water, I was ready for the scorching heat in the mountainous rally stages.
I turned 5 in 2003, the most pivotal year for Subaru in WRC. My father and I became Subaru fanatics, thanks to the Boxer rumble emitted from the race cars’ exhaust. We couldn’t get enough of it and would stay up late in the night planning our next trip just to relive it again. Subaru and rally created a bond between my father and me that was inseparable.
Over the course of 14 rallies, Subaru WRC driver Petter Solberg won the championship by a single point in the final rally of the year. It was one of the handful of times I saw my father cry.
“I remember your mother yelling at me to stop screaming,” my dad says when I ask him about Solberg’s 2003 triumph. “They called him Mr. Hollywood. Petter was loved by everyone, especially here in Europe. He had a habit of finishing a rally stage and waving to nearby fans using his left hand and steering the car with the other. He stuck out from the rest. I loved him.”
It became our mission to squeeze the most out of the three summer days that Greece hosted the Acropolis Rally. Every year we anticipated the rally with the excitement of Christmas morning.
Nothing that I have experienced in my life comes close to replicating the thrill from the echoes of a rally car making its way to where you stand as it flashes by at 100 to 120 mph, throwing roostertails of dirt and rocks on its way out of your sight. I was hooked.
The 2004 WRC season saw Australian driver Chris Atkinson partner with Solberg. At first, we considered him an interloper as he struggled to keep up with the front-runners. But we quickly recognized he was special. He always managed to take the competition and fans by surprise.
Solberg was the superstar, but Atkinson left us smiling even when we didn’t expect him to.
“The mouths of Greek spectators around us dropped in 2007,” my dad says while talking about Atkinson. “Remember when he somehow nursed a nearly broken-down Impreza to third place? There was something about Atkinson that made him impossible to dislike; he had grit, but more importantly, a personality to go with it.”
Having turned 10 by the end of 2008, I was nearing a decade with my father of waving flags for the Subaru rally team at every Acropolis Rally. The competition had a greater significance to us than a simple getaway weekend; it had a permanent spot in our lives and friendship.
But sadly, the Subaru team withdrew from the competition at the completion of the 2008 season. The announcement was the end of an important period for my father and me. But a more monumental shift was on the horizon. In around April of 2009, my parents told my siblings and me to prepare for a big change.
That summer, my mother, siblings and I packed everything we could fit into one-way luggage and moved to the United States.
“It felt like part of my life was being taken away from me,” my dad says. “I had to swallow it because there were more important things ahead of me. I had to support my family for what awaited us on the other side of the world.”
The transition to the U.S. was difficult. Apart from learning a new language and adapting to different social environments, I struggled to deal with spending time away from my father, who was serving his final year as a Navy officer in Greece. By the end of 2011, however, I was making strides academically and was able to see my father once again after he fully immigrated to the country.
As 2014 rolled around, I found myself in high school, still daydreaming about WRC Subaru Impreza models carving up Greek mountain roads.
Following a bit of research, we found a Facebook ad describing what appeared to be the perfect entry back into the Subaru community: the Wicked Big Meet, one of six massive Subaru events held throughout the country. We lived in New Hyde Park in Long Island, New York, and the Wicked Big Meet was at Stafford Springs, Connecticut, three hours away.
We arrived at Wicked Big Meet with no expectations, but what we found was a revelation: The emotions I had felt as a kid at the Acropolis rallies filled my heart again. A sea of World Rally Blue-painted Subaru vehicles filled the parking area as the event’s marshals slowly let everyone through the entrance gates. It looked like an overexcited swarm of teenagers waiting to see their favorite pop star perform.
Four years later, my father and I attended Wicked Big Meet once again. We soon noticed a familiar name printed on the side of the Subaru kiosk: Chris Atkinson. The rally driver I had grown up following was 100 feet away! At the event, he was available for ride-alongs and autographs.
We headed straight toward his tent. Once the shock of meeting him settled, we spoke about his success with Subaru at the Acropolis rallies. When I began to describe the feeling of watching him race in Greece, Chris asked if I would like to accompany him in a Subaru rally car for a lap around the track.
I strapped on a helmet, sat next to Chris and watched as my childhood dream played out in front of me. Chris and I exchanged a smile before he unleashed 500 horsepower onto the tarmac.
The experience of it all was nothing close to what I had imagined. Prior to securing my racing harness, I pictured a smooth joyride and a short conversation with Chris; I was wrong. Instead, the smell of race-grade fuel filled my airways and the noise of the open exhaust clogged my ears.
My back dug into the bucket seat as the car swayed from each corner. Once my senses finally found their way back to my body, I stopped clenching my fingers into the seat and continued laughing well into the end of the lap.
The entire circuit lasted maybe five minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. From a distance, I saw my father sitting on the bleachers, smiling like he once had on the sidelines of the Acropolis Rally.
“I was completely overwhelmed with happiness,” my dad says. “It was something greater than happiness – I felt like doing backflips at that moment.”
The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek nostos meaning “returning home,” and algos translates to “pain.” It’s acute homesickness – a longing to return to the places that made us feel whole. The sound of a SUBARU BOXER® engine is my first love. It continues to transport me back to Greece and holds the bond that made my father my best friend.
The Acropolis Rally of Greece
Dusty, rough, rocky, fast and blisteringly hot, the Acropolis Rally of Greece is one of the most physically demanding events in motorsport for both cars and drivers.
Since 1951, the Automobile and Touring Club of Greece has laid out a punishing course that traditionally starts under the Acropolis in Athens. But through the 1980s, the rally ran through stages in Kalambaka near Meteora, in the shade of Mount Olympus, all the way to the Peloponnese in the south.
In the early 2000s, when Panagiotis and Ioannis Argitis attended, the rally headquarters were in Lamia and Itea. After moving around the country, the headquarters moved back to the classic arduous mountain stages in 2016.
At the first Acropolis Rally that Panagiotis and his father attended, five Subaru teams were in the top 10 finishers, including local favorites Ioannis Papadimitriou and Nikolaos Petropoulos in a 1999 Impreza.
