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.” Schmitz, a popular German racing driver and former presenter of the BBC show “Top Gear,” known for her punchy comments and a buoyant personality that stood out in a male-dominated industry, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Trier, in southwestern Germany. She was 51. Her half brother, Beat Schmitz, said the cause was cancer. A cheerful and spirited driver, Schmitz was called “Queen of the Nürburgring” and the “fastest taxi driver in the world” — for driving thrill-seeking racing fans around the track in a BMW. She won the popular Nürburgring 24-hour race in 1996 — becoming the first woman to do so — and then again the next year. She became known to an even broader public when she joined “Top Gear” in 2016 after several appearances on the show. She and her husband, Klaus Abbelen, founded the racing team Frikadelli Racing. 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.
