Sabine Schmitz is one of those people you dream of meeting at least once in your lifetime. She’s been called a number of things, from ‘The Fastest Taxi Driver in the World’ to ‘Queen of the Nurburgring’ but overall, she’s just absolutely great at driving. She started her racing days with BMW on the Nurburgring, as a Ring Taxi driver and over the years she probably scared thousands of people senseless while pushing an M5 to the absolute limit.
To us, gearheads, it may seem like the best joy ride in the world but for random people who aren’t as dedicated as us, getting a ride with Sabine must be quite a traumatizing experience. Not everyone’s used to approaching a turn at triple-digit speeds without flinching. That’s what Sabine does though and she’s just brilliant at it, as you can see in the footage below. This is some rather old clip though, shot when the E39 M5 was still being used for Taxi rides on the Ring.
Right behind Sabine there’s a 996-generation Porsche 911 GT3 trying to overtake her. From a performance point of view, the Porsche has the M5 beat. The 996 GT3 had 375 HP at its disposal which is just 25 HP shy of what the BMW M5 had under the hood. However, the Porsche is also a lot lighter, nearly half a ton between the two cars, without including the extra passengers Sabine had to take care of.
Furthermore, you can clearly see she was out to show the customers a good time, drifting the car occasionally, just to get them to smile or clench their buttocks, depending on the individual. Even so, the footage shows great driving from Sabine and just why I’m currently looking for a BMW E39 M5 myself, a brilliant car no matter how you look at it.
