Paddy Hopkirk
Motor racing driver who had a celebrated victory in a Mini Cooper at the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally
PADDY HOPKIRK, who has died aged 89, was a racing driver whose victory in the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally in a Mini Cooper made the car famous around the world just as the Swinging Sixties were kicking in.
The Mini, in which Hopkirk was partnered by Henry Liddon, was one of 30 cars in the 240-strong field to start the race in Minsk, then in the Soviet Union. Drivers converged on Reims from various European cities before driving the same stages through the Alps to Monte Carlo.
Because of the complex system of timings and handicaps, the drivers arrived on the Côte d’azur not knowing where they were in the standings, and Hopkirk was asleep in his hotel room when a French journalist rang to tell him that the race was theirs as long as they did not break down on the next day’s final stage. They were duly presented with their trophy by Princess Grace and Prince Rainier.
Hopkirk had smuggled in caviar from the Soviet Union, intending to sell it when he got to France, but instead he and his team had a caviar party. Back home in Britain, the car and its drivers became stars, and there was an appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium at the insistence of the host, Bruce Forsyth. “They wrote a comedy routine about me and I drove the car on to the stage,” Hopkirk recalled.
He received a telegram from the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglashome, and one from The Beatles which read: “It’s nice to be No 1 isn’t it? Stop.” They also sent a signed photo with the message “You’re one of us now Paddy!”
Patrick Barron Hopkirk was born in Belfast on April 14 1933, the son of an Army engineer who had spent time building roads in India. The family moved out to Whitehouse, on the shores of Belfast Lough. There, his father had six greenhouses, and Paddy used to visit a neighbouring clergyman to take him grapes. When he was seven the priest died, bequeathing the boy his Harding car – something like a motorised wheelchair.
Living on an estate with private roads, young Paddy was able to learn to drive his new vehicle unhindered by traffic and he soon decided to be a rally driver. He attended Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school in Co Kildare. By his own admission he struggled academically, being dyslexic, and he began to study Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, but dropped out as his racing career gathered momentum.
By the time he was 17 he had saved up enough to buy an old Austin 7, which he rebuilt himself and used to begin rallying. In those days the sport was won or lost on “driving tests”, as they were called (today they are referred to as autotests) and Hopkirk honed his skills weaving around pylons, often in reverse, and making handbrake turns in narrow country lanes, all against the clock.
His first victory was on St Patrick’s Day 1954 in a VW 1200 Beetle. Victories in the Hewison Trophy (the Irish Rally Championship) in 1954 and 1955, made him known on the mainland, resulting in a berth in the RAC Rally of Great Britain in 1955.
He joined the Triumph factory team and had his first big success in the 1958 Circuit of Ireland, which he and his navigator, Jack Scott, won in a Triumph TR3A. But he was fired by Triumph after he continued to drive on a flat tyre while climbing the tortuous Stelvio Pass in the Italian Dolomites, destroying the car’s suspension.
However, he was snapped up by Sunbeam, and in 1961 he and Scott won the Circuit of Ireland for the second time. They were also third overall in the 1962 Monte Carlo Rally, and that year saw the turning point in Hopkirk’s career, when he joined the British Motor Corporation team alongside the Finns, Rauno Aaltonen and Timo Makinen.
He went on to win six more international rallies: there were two more victories in the Circuit of Ireland, two victories in the Alpine Rally in
France, one in Germany and one in the Acropolis Rally in Greece.
He did not continue driving with Liddon for very long, however: “In the end we had a sort of mild divorce,” he recalled. “Maybe I got a bit too big for my boots after I won the Monte.”
In the 1966 Monte Carlo Rally he finished third, with his Mini-driving teammate Timo Makinen, who had also won the previous year, supposedly the victor. But the organisers were determined to avoid a third Mini victory in a row and decided that all the British cars’ headlamp bulbs did not conform to regulations.
A Citroën was declared the winner, and as Hopkirk recalled, “It all became a bit of an international incident – but the Minis probably got more publicity than they would’ve done if they’d simply been allowed to win.”
In 1968 he finished second in the 10,000 mile London-to-sydney Marathon Rally with Alec Poole and Tony Nash; on the penultimate stage they gave up their chance of overall victory when the Citroën just ahead of them collided with another car, on a road that was supposed to be closed to general traffic. They probably saved the life of Lucien Bianchi by pulling him out of his burning vehicle.
Hopkirk retired from full-time competition in 1970; he was a successful businessman, importing Toyotas and running his own automotive sales and marketing company and car-accessory firm.
He did much work for Wheelpower, the national charity for wheelchair sport based at Stoke Mandeville, and Skidz, which trained disadvantaged young people in car mechanics.
Many years later, Hopkirk mentioned the Harding car of his childhood in a radio interview, and a listener who restored motorbikes rang in to say that he also had one. Hopkirk visited him in south London – to find that the Harding was his own from half a century before. He bought it and took it home. The Mini Cooper in which he won the Monte Carlo Rally found a permanent home at the British Motor Heritage Centre in Warwickshire.
Paddy Hopkirk, who was appointed MBE in 2016, lived in Buckinghamshire with his wife Jenny, whom he married in 1967, and who survives him along with their daughter and two sons.
Paddy Hopkirk, born April 14 1933, died July 21 2022