[headhunt3r]

Nice story posted on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/commen...schmitz_story/

When I first started going to the Nürburgring in the late 1990s, Sabine Schmitz was one of the BMW Ring Taxi drivers. She was a successful VLN racer and pretty famous in Nürburg, but not anywhere else.

Nürburg was a quieter place back then - Sabine and I had a bunch of mutual friends, so we'd often end up in the same bars. At midnight in the Pistenklaus on a rainy weekend in 2000, several of us were debating whether to drive at all the following day. There was even more rain in the forecast, and the circuit isn't forgiving.

Sabine offered to demonstrate the "wet lines" for us in the Ring Taxi. The wet lines on a racing circuit are quite different to the dry ones - to avoid laid-down rubber and puddles you have to take a circuitous route around the track and it varies a lot according to how wet it is and how recently it rained. It's complicated. The Ring Taxi normally booked up months in advance, but they'd had cancellations because of the weather and she was sure it'd be fine. We were to rock up at the trackside office at 10 and say Sabine sent us.

The Pistenklaus closed and we all went our separate ways.

The following morning we staggered into the little office. It was raining far more than the previous day. The car park was almost empty, and the only vehicles that were going out on track were the usual flotilla of panel vans - fearless motorcyclists who couldn't ride in the rain but could sure take out their bike transporter.

I was terribly excited to be on a guest list, but I also didn't feel very well at all. Ten minutes later we were sat in the M5, with Sabine heading out onto the track. Sabine was as chatty as ever and seemed positively excited about driving around the track in a deluge. Maybe she didn't get hangovers.

Once we were through the entry barrier, Sabine floored it. The M5 was a big car but it lifted its skirts pretty effectively and, as we flew up towards Döttinger Höhe, she started to chat about the wet line through Tiergarten. The panel vans ahead were seeing the familiar white M5 in the rear view mirror and pulling right. Sabine waved a cheery "thanks" to them all.

The wipers were on full speed but we were going fast enough that they were mostly pushing water down the windscreen rather than off it. I was in the back, and my hangover had some questions.

We whooshed through Hatzenbach sideways with Sabine cackling and the rest of us becoming a bit less chatty. I held onto the grab handle on the door. Maybe she was still drunk?

About a third of the way around the track we came down into the corner after Hocheichen. I don't think it has a name, because it's not that much of a corner - it's a very slight right-hander over a little rise and is flat out in any of the cars I've driven around that track.

As we gained pace towards it, it occurred to me that this may not in fact be a flat out corner in a two-ton car with four people in it during a rainstorm. Sabine, however, evidently did not share this opinion and kept chatting away with her foot resolutely on the floor.

As we went over the top of the rise, she lost it. We were at 100+ mph and the rear snapped viciously. We were certainly going to spin, but there was also a lot of rollover potential. I sunk down in the seat and held my belt. Hopefully we'd slide as much on the black stuff as possible so that we would scrub off some speed before we hit the barrier on the left.

I'm not entirely sure what happened. Sabine shouted "HA!" and we were on the left side of the track heading up to Flugplatz. She had her foot on the floor again. "HA!", she giggled, as we went so light over Flugplatz that I gagged briefly. Doesn't she know there's another corner here?

I managed not to barf during the rest of the lap, but I don't remember any of the tips she gave us.

Sabine was a well-known attractive woman in a predominantly male environment, but she navigated it with decorum and humility and was just very easy to spend time around. There's a lot of ego in motorsport and, as far as I know, she had none of it.

I'm never going to understand the wet lines at the Nürburgring, but that's okay. I'm not Sabine Schmitz.