Alex Zanardi, who has died aged 59, was a Formula One driver and two-times champion in Cart (previously IndyCar); he was also a paralympian who won four gold medals as a hand-cyclist. Perhaps above all he was esteemed as an inspirational figure who reinvented his life after losing both legs in a racing accident in 2001.

In September that year, Zanardi was competing in a Cart race at Lausitzring in north-east Germany, the first time the American series raced in Europe, and was leading the race when he made a late refuelling stop. He lost control while exiting the pits, spun across the track and was hit broadside-on by Alex Tagliani. The impact sheared Zanardi’s car in half. “Part of the car stayed with me, and the other part left, with parts of me in it,” Zanardi recalled in his autobiography My Story (2004).

Zanardi almost bled to death, losing all but one litre of his blood. With his left leg severed at the thigh and the right at the knee, he was saved only by the decisive action of the doctors Terry Trammell and Steve Olvey, who had him helicoptered to an intensive care unit in Berlin. His heart stopped three times before he got there.

Yet, six weeks later, he was out of hospital, starting an arduous rehabilitation programme and learning to walk with prosthetic legs – he subsequently designed his own bespoke limbs. In 2003, using a car with specially modified controls, he returned to the Lausitzring and symbolically drove the 13 laps he had failed to complete in 2001.

Declaring that his crash was “an opportunity to start all over again”, Zanardi drove for BMW in the European and World Touring Car Championships between 2003 and 2009, winning three races, and in 2014 raced in the Blancpain Sprint Series. In January 2019 he drove in the 24 Hours of Daytona.

In 2007, he was invited by his sponsor, Barilla pasta, to attend the New York marathon and make a short speech, but decided he might as well enter the marathon himself, riding a handcycle. After a scant three weeks of training, he entered the event and finished fourth. It was the start of a new phase of his life which would see him winning marathons in Venice, Rome and New York, and collecting two golds and a silver medal at both the 2012 London Paralympics and the 2016 Rio Paralympics.

Zanardi was born in Castel Maggiore, near Bologna, in Italy. He was the younger child of Dino Zanardi, a plumber, and his wife, Anna, a shirtmaker. His older sister, Cristina, was killed in a car accident when she was 15. Since Alex was, as he put it, “the crazy one, the wild one”, his bereaved parents were terrified that he would want to ride a motorcycle as soon as he was old enough. Instead his father bought him a go-kart just before his 14th birthday. The first time he sat in it was, he recalled, “by far the best day of my life”. Over the next seven years he won three go-kart titles in Italy as well as the European championship.

He was nearly 22 when he graduated to car racing, joining the Italian Formula 3 series in 1988. It was there that he met Daniela Manni, who managed the Erre 3 racing team; they married in 1996. After several podium finishes in F3, in 1991 he joined the Il Barone Rampante team in Formula 3000 (the level below Formula One), scoring two wins and four second places.

Zanardi was attracting the attention of F1, and late in 1991 he drove three races for Jordan, twice finishing ninth but scoring no points. Prior to this he had been given a crash course in F1’s Machiavellian politics when he became an unwitting pawn in a legal battle between the Jordan boss Eddie Jordan and Benetton’s Flavio Briatore, as Briatore tried to wrest the rising star Michael Schumacher away from Jordan.

In 1992 Zanardi joined the Minardi team, but achieved only two “Did Not Qualifies” and a retirement. He joined Lotus for 1993, scoring a solitary point in Brazil, but a serious crash in Belgium ended his season prematurely. The following year brought no points, and was also Lotus’s Formula One swansong.

Zanardi concluded that his time in F1 was over. Prompted by Rick Gorne of Reynard Motorsport, manufacturer of cars for Cart, Zanardi headed for the US and signed with Chip Ganassi Racing. It was the start of his most successful period in car-racing. “I had made a sufficient number of mistakes by that point to say OK, I know what I have to do,” he said. In 1996 he won three races, ended the season in third place and was named rookie of the year.

The following season he won the championship, and also invented the “donut”, a victory celebration in which the car spins round its axis in a cloud of tyre smoke. In 1998 he won the championship again, winning seven of the 19 races. His warm and gregarious personality made him one the sport’s most popular drivers.

In retrospect he would regret returning to Formula One, but an offer from the Williams team proved too tempting. However, his solitary season with them (1999) brought him no points and a disastrous 10 retirements in 16 races. He returned to the US, and was back in Cart for the fateful 2001 season.

Zanardi’s fightback after his Lausitzring accident earned him global renown. He refused to let his injuries hold him back, and became an in-demand motivational speaker. “I have such a happy life, and it’s related to all the great things I’ve done in this new condition of mine,” he told F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast in 2020. This was only days before he suffered a collision with a truck while competing in the Obiettivo tricolore road race for paralympic athletes in Italy. He was taken to a hospital in Siena with serious head injuries and placed in a medically induced coma. In 2021 he was able to return home for rehabilitation.

He is survived by Daniela and their son, Niccolò.