Following occasional drives with the family car on the Nordschleife, all three Schmitz sisters started racing, but only Sabine continued and went on to achieve several notable victories.
Schmitz had become synonymous with the Nurburgring, the 14-mile circuit in Germany that is renowned as the toughest in the world.
She won the 24-hour touring car race at the track twice, in 1996 and 1997, driving a BMW M3. She also won in CHC and VLN race events & the VLN endurance racing championship in 1998.
She was also a qualified helicopter pilot, and was a restaurant owner until 2003 before she focused on racing full-time.
She became known as the “Queen of the Nurburgring” and estimated she had driven around the track more than 20,000 times.
TopGear
Schmitz later gained acclaim for an appearance on the UK version of Top Gear in 2004 in which she teached Jeremy Clarkson around the famous german track.
After Clarkson (under her tutelage) set a lap time of 9 minutes 59 seconds around the Nürburgring in a Jaguar S-Type diesel (Series 5, Episode 5), she dismissed his best lap with the comment “I tell you something, I do that lap time in the van”.
She did a lap in the Jaguar S-Type, and set a time of 9 minutes 12 seconds, beating him by 47 seconds. When trying to film Schmitz as she drove the S-Type, the film crew were unable to keep up, and had to get Jaguar test driver Wolfgang Schubauer to drive the Jaguar S-Type R chase car.
In a later episode Schmitz drove a Ford Transit diesel van in an attempt to beat Clarkson’s time set in the Jaguar, missing his time by just 9 seconds.
After becoming a superstar on TopGear she and fellow D Motor presenters Carsten van Ryssen and Tim Schrick, featured in a Top Gear challenge of “Top Gear Vs the Germans”. The Top Gear team faced off against the German team in a series of comedy-biased challenges in order to see which team was the best.
Team TopGear UK would come out on top thanks to The Stig with a race victory over touring car specialist Tim Schrick. She subsequently would became a presenter on the show alongside Chris Evans, Matt LeBlanc and many more in the soft reboot version in 2016.
Illness
In July 2020, Schmitz revealed via a Facebook post that she had been suffering from “an extremely persistent cancer” since late 2017. She explained that she had sought treatment and her condition was improving, but she had relapsed and would be undergoing treatment again.
At the time of her revelation, Schmitz was still making recurring appearances on Top Gear. She died of cancer at a hospital in Trier on 16 March 2021, aged 51.
The Nürburgring have renamed the first corner of the Nordschleife loop as the “Sabine-Schmitz-Kurve” posthumously in her honour.
“When she walked into a room if it was as if though things just got a bit brighter, a bit louder. She was turning everything up on your television. That’s just what she was like.”
Jeremy Clarkson
Sabine radiated positivity, always wore her cheeky smile no matter how hard things got and was a force of nature for female drivers in the motoring world.
