Paddy Hopkirk obituary

Paddy Hopkirk’s victory in the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally was such an event that he, his navigator, Henry Liddon, and their car, a Mini Cooper, were invited to appear on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, an ITV show with an audience that sometimes approached 20 million.

The rally, a three-day midwinter event in which competitors set off from all points of Europe to converge on the principality, with the winner judged via a complicated handicap system, was closely followed by television and the newspapers. Victory for a little British car that symbolised the revival of Britain’s cultural energy was seen as a cause for national celebration. The Beatles sent a congratulatory telegram, as did the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Hopkirk, a convivial Northern Irishman who has died aged 89, had become and would remain a major figure in British motor sport, as a rally and racing driver, the owner of a successful business selling car accessories, president of the Historic Rally Car Register and a vice-president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club.

Born in Belfast to Kathleen and Francis, he was educated at the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood college in County Kildare, Ireland. His first motoring experience came at the age of nine, when a clergyman left him an old two-seater bath chair in his will. In the grounds of a local estate, he learned to master its motorcycle engine and rear-wheel brakes, noting that “it taught you quite a lot about skid control”. The bath chair was followed by a motorcycle and sidecar, and then an Austin 7.

At Trinity College Dublin, despite having dyslexia, he studied engineering. Since he had not asked the Catholic church for permission to attend what was then thought of as a Protestant institution,