She was 51. Her half brother, Beat Schmitz, said the cause was cancer.
She was the only woman to win the epic 24-hour race at the storied Nürburgring track in Germany. She became a spirited presenter on the BBC show “Top Gear.”
For Sabine Schmitz, going to the storied Nürburgring car racing track in Western Germany was like going to school. Growing up near the track, one of the world’s most famous, she had always loved speed and by her own account completed more than 20,000 laps of that circuit.
“I never had to learn the track,” she once said. “It’s in my blood.”
Her later racing years were spent with the family-owned Frikadelli Racing team where she finished a very impressive third overall at the N24 in 2008, behind only the full-factory backed Manthey Porsches.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/Z5TL6MRBFVHENCP35MDQFOXUPI.jpg "The Queen of the 'Ring Sabine Schmitz loses long fight against cancer 3")
Whilst Sabine was already well known to a German TV audience, her ‘reach’ was expanded massively when she was featured in a number of pieces for BBC’s Top Gear programme, later becoming a regular presenter for the show.
Alongside that she was a down-to-earth key part of the family hotel business, the DSC crew astonished to be shown to their rooms there, after arriving hopelessly late, by the instantly recognisable and still smiling ‘Ring racing icon!
Through all of it though she was still a focused ‘Ring Racer, and she’ll be mourned by that whole community.
DSC sends our profound condolences to her partner Klaus Abbelen, all at Frikadelli Racing and to all of Sabine’s family and countless friends.
Sabine Schmitz was born on May 14, 1969 in Adenau, in Western Germany. The daughter of a wholesaler and a hotel manager in the village of Nurburg, near the border with Belgium, she grew up less than a mile from the Nürburgring complex, and although she trained as a hotelier, she had wanted to be a racing driver since she was 13, she said.
The new Nordschleife, which was modified when Schmitz was 2, became her playground. She was able to recite the names of the 73 turns by heart, and she first completed it at age 17 — with her mother’s car, before she had a driving license.
“They put on racing tires, took off the license plates and raced it on the track,” Beat Schmitz said about Sabine and the family. “My mother would drive that same car to the hairdresser or to do groceries.”
He added, “It’s just like the kid who is born next to the soccer stadium and is in a soccer team at 5.”
After competing in amateur races with her two sisters, Schmitz joined a BMW team in the early 1990s. She remains the only female driver to have won Nürburgring’s 24-hour race, which draws 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 racing series, in which Schmitz was a frequent competitor.
She became one of the main attractions at the racing complex as a driver of a BMW “ring taxi,” in which she took paying customers on a high-speed lap around the track. She boasted about being “the fastest taxi driver in the world.”
“It’s really fun to scare people,” she said on “Top Gear” in 2010. “They love to get scared, so they pay me for that.”
Schmitz’s time on “Top Gear” brought a non-British touch to a show mostly run by men and aimed at them. She favored escapades in which she would try to pass 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 on the Nürburgring circuit in less than 10 minutes — with a Ford van. She did it in 10:08 minutes.
“I think she loved how much she could shock middle-aged men who thought they could drive a bit — until they saw what she could do,” Chris Harris, another “Top Gear” presenter, said.
Schmitz left “Top Gear” last year, announcing that she had been under treatment for cancer since 2017.
Besides driving cars and later flying helicopters, she was passionate about animals, and her half brother, Beat, said he believed that her love for animals had kept her going throughout her cancer fight.
