Racing is hard work, but you would’ve never known it to watch Sabine Schmitz drive. She dove into every corner with the gleeful chuckle of a child playing peekaboo. “Where is the apex? Where is it? There it is!” Shriek, giggle, dimples, and a big grin. It looked so easy when she did it, so fun. No glowering race face for Schmitz; she loved driving and loved the Nürburgring, and it was so obvious that it made everyone who saw her love them too. It’s one thing to be talented at something and take pleasure in doing it well; it’s another level altogether to make everyone around you feel that same joy. When Schmitz died of cancer at age 51, it resonated as a personal loss to people who had never met her. That’s how bright her light was, how far it shone.
This story originally appeared in Volume 9 of Road & Track.
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Many of us first heard Schmitz’s delightful mix of laughter and swearing on Top Gear. In 2005, she coached host Jeremy Clarkson around the 73 turns of the Nordschleife in a Jaguar—then scoffed at his effort, declaring, “I do that lap time in a van.” And she nearly did, cussing out sport bikes she passed while waving away the smell of burning brakes and Richard Hammond’s terror.
That Ford Transit van may be Schmitz’s most famous lap, but it certainly wasn’t her first. Schmitz was born in Germany and grew up inside the perimeter of the Nürburgring, the fearsome track just a winding road on the way to school. In her first television interview with Clarkson, on a 2002 travel show called Jeremy Clarkson: Meets the Neighbours, Schmitz tells him that her first lap around the track was as a baby. “I was screaming on the back seat,” she says, throwing the BMW M5 Ring-Taxi into a left-hander with one hand on the wheel.
As she grew up, she came to love the Ring, with both the casual affection you’d hold for a landmark in your hometown and the intense respect of a professional racer.
Schmitz’s parents ran one of the oldest hotels in Nürburg; a long list of grand-prix racers had stayed beneath their roof. Maybe it was in the walls: Schmitz said that by the time she was 13, she knew she wanted to be a racing driver, and by 17, she was sneaking her mother’s car out on the Nürburgring, running fast laps a full year before she got her driver’s license, completely without permission. In a BMW interview, Schmitz recalls the track official saying with surprise, “Oh, Sabine, you are already 18. You got your driving license?” She improvised.“I said, ‘Uh, yes, bye-bye.’ Vroom.” When she did make it legal, her fast laps soon became official. Schmitz set a track lap record, 8:16 in a Ford Sierra RS Cosworth, in 1988. She was 19.
Schmitz raced all through the Nineties at the Nürburgring, where she excelled in endurance races and became known for her skill and confidence in bad weather. In 1996, with teammate Johannes Scheid, she became the first woman to win the Nürburgring 24 Hours. They won it again the next year. Their car, an E36 BMW M3, had a notable green-and-white livery with the Eifel mountain castle painted by Schmitz on the quarter panel. It’s a bold, cheerful bit of work, done with all the glee with which she seemed to tackle everything in her life—including the gig driving the Ring-Taxi that introduced her to Clarkson and led to numerous guest and starring TV roles.
Her appearances on Top Gear, Fifth Gear, and her own show in Germany, D Motor, made her a celebrity. Being passed on the Ring by Schmitz became a badge of honor. On Nürburgring Facebook pages, long threads are devoted to bragging about seeing Schmitz coming up fast in the rearview mirror or getting gently punted out of her way in competition. “Still got the mark on the back of the car,” reads one.
“They are slow, but I am fast,” Schmitz told Hammond in the Transit van episode, a sentence that would be arrogance in anyone else but comes across as fact when accompanied by Schmitz’s head tilt and shrug. By the time she retired as a Ring-Taxi driver, she had more than 30,000 laps to her name.
“She wasn’t trying to prove anything,” says racer Tommy Kendall, who worked with Schmitz on a 2012 Nürburgring record attempt. “She wasn’t trying to impress anyone at all. She just had the confidence of having the place mastered. She was in her element, like a top-gun fighter pilot or an astronaut. A dolphin in the waves.” She lived to share that joy.
Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver’s license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story "A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2." In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story "In Washington, D.C.'s Secret Carpool Cabal, It's a Daily Slug Fest" was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
