For Sabine Schmitz, going to the famous Nürburgring car race track in West Germany was like going to school. Growing up near the track, one of the most famous in the world, she always loved speed and completed more than 20,000 laps on that circuit on her own.
“I never had to learn the track,” she said once. “It’s in my blood.”
Schmitz, a popular German racing driver and former host of the BBC’s “Top Gear” program, known for her forceful comments and a cheerful personality who stood out in a male-dominated industry, died Tuesday at a hospital in Trier in southwestern Germany. She was 51 years old. His half brother, Beat Schmitz, said the cause was cancer.
A cheerful and spirited driver, Schmitz was called the “Queen of the Nürburgring” and the “fastest taxi driver in the world” – for driving racing fans in search of excitement around the track in a BMW. She won the popular Nürburgring 24-hour race in 1996 – becoming the first woman to do so – and again the following year. She became known to an even wider audience when she joined “Top Gear” in 2016, after several appearances on the program.
She and her husband, Klaus Abbelen, founded the Frikadelli Racing racing team.
Sabine Schmitz was born on May 14, 1969 in Adenau, West Germany. The daughter of a wholesaler and hotel manager in the village of Nurburg, close to the border with Belgium, she grew up less than a kilometer from the Nürburgring complex and, although she trained as a hotelier, she wanted to be a race driver since she was 13 years old. , she said.
The Nürburgring’s legendary main runway, the 20 km long Nordschleife, is known as Green Hell for its 73 curves as it meanders through the forest on the Eifel hills. In service since 1927, the track hosted Formula 1 races, but was later found to be very dangerous and redesigned.
The new Nordschleife, which was modified when Schmitz was 2, became his playground. She was able to recite the names of the 73 laps by heart, and she completed it for the first time at the age of 17 – with her mother’s car, before having a driver’s license.
“They put on racing tires, took off the license plates and ran on the track,” said Beat Schmitz of Sabine and her family. “My mother drove that same car to the hairdresser or to shop.”
He added: “It is like the child who is born next to a football stadium and is on a football team at the age of 5”.
After competing in amateur racing with her two sisters, Schmitz joined a BMW team in the early 1990s. She remains the only woman to win the Nürburgring 24-hour race, which attracts more than 200 racing teams and tens of thousands of fans every June. She finished third in the 2008 edition. The event is part of the VLN endurance race series, of which Schmitz was a frequent competitor.
She became one of the main attractions of the racing complex as a driver of a BMW “circular taxi”, in which she took paying customers on a high-speed lap around the track. She boasted of being “the fastest taxi driver in the world”.
“It’s really fun to scare people,” she said in “Top Gear” in 2010. “They love to be scared, so they pay me for it.”
Schmitz’s time on “Top Gear” brought a non-British touch to a program directed mainly by men and aimed at them. She preferred adventures in which she tried to overtake other drivers while driving a less powerful car than theirs.
One of her most popular moments on the show occurred in 2009, when she tried to complete a lap at the Nürburgring in less than 10 minutes – with a Ford van. She did this in 10:08 minutes.
“I think she loved how much she was able to shock middle-aged men who thought they could drive a little – until they saw what she could do,” said Chris Harris, another “Top Gear” host.
Schmitz left “Top Gear” last year, announcing that she has been on cancer treatment since 2017.
In addition to driving cars and then flying helicopters, she was passionate about animals, and her stepbrother, Beat, said she believed her love for animals kept her moving during her fight against cancer.
In addition to her stepbrother, she left her husband, mother and two sisters.
Many in the racing world paid tribute to Schmitz on Wednesday. Sophia Floersch, a 20-year-old German driver who became the first woman to compete in Formula 3 last year, found Schmitz racing inspiring and motivating.
On twitter, Nürburgring said he had lost his most famous racing driver, adding: “Sabine Schmitz passed away very early, after a long illness”.
Christopher Schuetze contributed reporting.