Obituary: Katie Quinn, rally driving champion who was an inspiration for her fellow female drivers
Katie Quinn, who has died in hospital unexpectedly at the age of 33, was a very successful rally driver and was the current Women in Motorsport Ireland Rally champion.
A regular competitor in rally events, she made her debut as a driver in 2017 after gaining experience as a co-driver for several years.
Born in Listowel, Co Kerry, she was the eldest of three girls reared by Mike and Mary Quinn.
She attended Scoil Bhreanainn in Kielduff and the Presentation and Mercy Mounthawk secondary schools. She then opted to take childcare studies in Tralee.
She spent some time working in Doonbeg and Kilkee, Co Clare, before moving back home to Listowel last year.
She had developed a keen interest in rally driving from a very young age through the influence of her father, Mike, who is an award-winning driver with Kerry Motor Club.
As her mother Mary recalled, she was “always following him around with cars” and also loved “the mechanical side”.
She joined her father’s club and learned how to navigate with him. Navigators, or co-drivers, play a crucial role, developing a particular skill in communicating the route, landmarks and hazards to the driver.
“The day before a race, the team will traverse the course with pace notes to plot out the various stages of the route,” Top Part West Coast Rally championship organiser Richard Talbot explained. The pace notes include numbers from one to six to identify the severity of a corner, starting with “one” which relates to a first-gear hairpin bend.
Katie made her debut as a driver in a Honda Civic when she entered the 2017 Garda Rally in Baltinglass, Co Wicklow. She took part in many rally events across the country, especially on rounds of the Top Part West Coast Rally Championship.
Just two years after her debut competition, she was crowned the Women in Motorsport Ireland Rally Champion in 2019 and repeated that success last year.
The championship involves six rounds with events extending from Kerry to Sligo and competitors are judged on the four best scores.
Building on her 2023 win, she registered for the 2024 Triton Showers National Rally Championship and she competed in the Mayo Rally for the first time.
“Katie was a very competent driver in the Class 2 Honda Civic and she really showed great promise,” Mr Talbot said.
“She was very jolly, determined to get to the top and was good fun to be around. She would have inspired a lot of women who are contending for the national award this year,” he added.
One of her proudest moments was competing with her sister Michelle, who was her navigator on the 2021 Kerry Winter Rally.
During her time living in Clare, she was an active member of Doonbeg Ladies Football Club and played latterly with Ballymacelligott GAA Club in Co Kerry.
The Munster, Connacht, Galway and Limerick motor clubs are among members of the rallying community who have expressed their sympathies to her family and Kerry Motor Club provided a guard of honour at her funeral.
Laura McMenamin of the Triton National Rally Championship recalled on RIP.ie that the event organisers had “many fond memories from her younger days at the rallies with Mike to the more recent years” and that there was “always a smile and time for a chat”.
In spite of her successes, her family always came first, her mother recalled, and she loved spending time with her sisters and with her nephew Rían.
“Wherever she was, every Christmas Eve she had to come home,” she said.
Katie Quinn is survived by her mother Mary, father Mike, sisters Tina and Michelle and her nephew Rían, her grandparents Pat and Chris, grandmother Bridget and her extended family.
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