Sabine Schmitz: Motorsport mourns the Queen of the Nürburgring who won a nation's hearts on Top Gear

Sabine Schmitz, who has died at the age of 51 after a four-year battle with cancer, was the only woman ever to win the Nürburgring 24-hour endurance race. In fact, she did it twice - in 1996 and 1997. So synonymous was she with the circuit, in Germany she was renowned by the simple soubriquet: The Queen of the Nürburgring.

But to car enthusiasts in Britain she was better known as the vivacious driver who would frequently scare the living daylights out of the presenters of Top Gear by driving them at warp-factor speed around her home track.

Given that she was both German and a woman - two significant triggers for the presentation team of the programme at its macho peak - the respect with which she was held was testament to her unanswerable brilliance as a driver. And she took much delight in challenging the then presenters' incorrigible misogyny.

"Terrible news about Sabine Schmitz," was Jeremy Clarkson’s response to her death. "Such a sunny person and so full of beans."

Schmitz often suggested she had the Nürburgring in her blood. Which was no surprise as she was raised on the circuit. Her parents ran one of the restaurants that serve visitors to the 14-mile track which is renowned as one of the toughest in the world.

From as early as she could remember she and her two sisters were intoxicated by the speed on their doorstep; she recalled she was first driven round the course when she was three years old.

Even as she was learning the restaurant business at college, her yearning was always to get behind the wheel of a car and drive round the ring very fast indeed. Despite the innate assumption in her sport that women could not compete on the same level as men, she proved extremely good at it.

So good in fact, in her mid-20s she was given the opportunity to compete in the 24-hour endurance race, driving for one of the BMW works teams. And in 1996, steering a BMW M3 she nicknamed Eifelblitz (Eifel Thunderbolt), she made history as the first - and it subsequently turned out only - female ever to win the race.

To demonstrate this was no fluke, she repeated the feat a year later. In 2005 she started her own team called Frikadelli Racing and came third in the 24-hour NBR in 2008. Pictures of her on the course invariably show her grinning wide, loving the moment.

The thing about the Nürburgring is that, when not hosting racing, it is open to the public. Anyone can pay a fee to unleash their inner Michael Schumacher and race round it. And part of Frikadelli Racing’s remit was to offer rides in what are known as Ring Taxis, in which customers could pay to be driven at speed around its full circumference.

Until 2011, Schmitz herself would frequently take fares round the course; she reckoned she had driven it more than 20,000 times, becoming intimate along the way with its every twist and turn.

It was in that capacity that she first came to the attention of the Top Gear team. And, in 2004, the producers hired her to sit as co-driver to guide Clarkson round the course in a Jaguar.

She mocked the time he clocked up, suggesting she could do it faster in a van. So she was next filmed driving an alarmed looking Richard Hammond round the course in a Ford Transit. She delivered a time only a couple of seconds slower than Clarkson.

She proved such a lively and entertaining television presence, she became a regular on the show.

In 2006 she won Top Gear’s Best German of the Year and, when she picked up her trophy, Clarkson suggested on air she should replace Hammond as presenter on the grounds she was "quicker, cheaper, better looking and above all taller".

Clearly someone took note. When Clarkson and the rest of the team decamped to Amazon in 2016, she became an occasional presenter alongside Chris Evans and Matt Leblanc, as well as continuing to terrify the subsequent teams in various challenges.

"She gave me pointers on how to drive a Ferrari very fast and hunted me down in a banger race," the current presenter Paddy McGuinness noted on Twitter. "Brilliantly bonkers and an amazing human being! RIP the great Sabine."

Indeed such was the esteem with which she was held, a special edition of the show dedicated to her cruelly curtailed abilities, will be aired on Sunday.