The race ran July 16 to 19 and attracted an estimated 40,000 people, who together gave medics, security staff, and the police only the minimal amount of work – while the small number of incidents mostly involved foreign spectators and visitors and not Estonian fans.

The two race stages halted, for 10-15 minutes each, both came on the Friday, the first full day of racing, after a "Central European group had ventured right up to the edge of the stage in extremely fast sections," Rally Estonia competition director Urmas Roosimaa said, noting this endangered themselves and the racers too.

Priit Pärgmaa, area manager at security firm Forus, said staff at the event were kept busy by "self-created spectator areas formed by spectators, where people tended to stretch the safety tape," at locations far from the spectator zones and with no easy access route to them.

On the whole though, the event was "an excellent rally", one which is getting "better and better" from the perspective of his work, adding: "Perceptually, it was the foreigners with whom we had to intervene a little more. Estonians, it seems, call each other to order more," Pärgmaa noted.

Rally Estonia competition director Urmas Roosimaa also told Delfi the issues, which were not major, were mostly caused by visitors from other countries, adding Estonian spectators were the most well-behaved – as were the majority of foreign spectators – and that plans are in place to address the matter even more effectively at future races.

The Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) were only needed in one case, where a Lithuanian citizen was detained in Tartu after being apprehended drink driving on the Friday – while the PPA would not comment on the exact level of intoxication in this case, the authority notes Rally Estonia is a sporting, family event, not a venue for excessive consumption of alcohol.

Another incident involved local livestock – a herd of cattle were disturbed by an official WRC helicopter, which PPA rally operation chief Andrus Reimaa said had "acted aggressively towards a herd of cattle," causing them to stampede and break through a fence, endangering the safety of the nearby ongoing race before the animals' owner and others quickly resolved the matter.

Ticks, a regular summer scourge in Estonia, were also in evidence at Rally Estonia, though only around a dozen cases required safe removal from fans who had picked up one of the parasites, while other minor injuries related to stones, splinters, and other debris thrown up by the passing cars – crews who rolled their vehicles naturally also required medical attention, but no driver or co-driver needed hospitalization.

Compared with the previous year, the event was much quieter, said the event's chief medic, Liisa Hell, partly because the weather was not as hot and so there were fewer incidents involving dehydration and other heat-related issues.

Roosimaa praised the event's staff and organizers, also noting there was no difficulty for Forus in filling the close to 350 security positions for the event, as there was such a rush of rally fans applying that it was possible to select the sufficiently qualified individuals.

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