Before the lights went out at Sveg Raceway, the World eX community welcomed a guest whose name is written into the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leena Gade became the first female race engineer to win Le Mans outright, and she went on to win it three times with Audi. Since then, she has worked in IMSA, IndyCar and Extreme E. In our Bizz Talk she talked openly about how she got into the sport, those nights at La Sarthe, the progress women have made in motorsport engineering, and where Formula 1 is heading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her route into racing was anything but direct. After university, with student debts to pay off, Leena started out in the automotive industry. She worked in noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) at Jaguar, then at MIRA, the Motor Industry Research Association in Nuneaton. At weekends she volunteered as a data engineer, often for little more than her expenses, working her way from Formula Vee to Formula BMW, A1 GP and GT racing. Her first Le Mans came in 2006 with a privateer Lola LMP1 team, the same year Audi arrived with its diesel R10. \u201cIt would be really nice to work for them one day,\u201d she remembers thinking as she looked down the paddock. A few months later, a conversation with Howden Haynes about a completely different project turned into what she only later realised was a job interview. When Haynes pulled out a handbook with the R10 on the cover, she thought: \u201cThis is big.\u201d After a short chat about her experience, he offered her the role. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018Was that an interview?\u2019\u201d By April 2007 she was in St. Petersburg as Haynes\u2019 assistant engineer at Champion Racing, working with Allan McNish and Dindo Capello. \u201cI\u2019ve never looked back since. It was one of the best opportunities I was given,\u201d she said. \u201cIt set me up pretty much for the rest of my career, taking those concepts, those ideas, those philosophies along to do other stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Endurance racing is still where her heart lies. \u201cBy far, it\u2019s one of the most enjoyable,\u201d she said. She especially enjoyed IMSA, where \u201cyou have quite an impact on it as a race engineer because you call the strategy.\u201d On the Mazda DPi programme with Multimatic, her team used the strategy model Joest Racing had developed during the Audi days. American racing also taught her how much dampers matter on bumpy circuits, a lesson that grew during her short time in IndyCar. Extreme E was \u201cthe outlier\u201d: a project first run in partnership with McLaren. Formula 1 was a childhood dream, inspired by Senna, Prost, Mansell and the active-suspension cars of the early 1990s. But she is wary of how specialised roles become in teams of 400 or 500 people. \u201cYou become very specialized in Formula 1. You\u2019re very much centered on just one area,\u201d she explained. Coming from endurance racing, where everyone in a team of 40 helps out across different areas, \u201cI think that could get quite frustrating.\u201d So F1 is \u201ccurrently not on the list \u2013 but you never know.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her memories of Le Mans cover the whole range of emotions. In 2008, as Haynes\u2019 assistant, she was part of the win for McNish, Kristensen and Capello, a race captured in the film \u2018Truth in 24\u2019. The Peugeots were three seconds a lap faster at the start, and the word she remembers from that weekend is \u2018resilience\u2019. Then came 2011, her first year as a lead race engineer. The build-up was rough: in Sebring and Spa her car ran out of fuel, and she honestly expected to be fired before Le Mans: \u201cThose are such basic mistakes that you don\u2019t make as a race engineer.\u201d After Spa she asked her mechanics, engineers and drivers for brutally honest feedback. They told her she spoke too fast on the radio, changed her mind too often and didn\u2019t believe in herself. \u201cTo say it was brutal would be an understatement,\u201d she recalled. Beno\u00eet Tr\u00e9luyer suggested the drivers should report only their top three issues instead of a hundred. Her new rule was simple: \u201cTake a deep breath before you open the radio channel, then speak, and make a decision. And if it\u2019s wrong, it doesn\u2019t matter, we\u2019ll fix it.\u201d The car took a surprise pole on 20-lap-old tyres. Then Allan McNish had his huge crash, and late at night Mike Rockenfeller had his terrible accident, with the team going what felt like hours without knowing how he was. In the end it was one Audi against four Peugeots. On Tom Kristensen\u2019s advice, the last stop included four new tyres instead of changing one tyre that had a slow puncture. Andr\u00e9 Lotterer crossed the line with only a tiny margin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTo say I had no idea what the hell had happened would be an understatement, because it was just a race in my head. We had to get it done. The emotion that I saw in the rest of the Audi team is something that will live with me forever.\u201d The team, she said, \u201cwas like a family.\u201d It took three or four months before it sank in: \u201cWow, we just won Le Mans.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her worst Le Mans was 2016, her last year with Audi: a new battery hybrid concept, no completed endurance test, and a car she simply \u201chated\u201d. \u201cI\u2019ve never had such a bad Le Mans, ever, in the nine years I was there.\u201d From Tom Kristensen and the other Audi drivers she learned a lesson that has stayed with her, no matter how good the simulation models are: \u201cIf you don\u2019t focus on drivability, you\u2019re not gonna be able to get round Le Mans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On women in motorsport engineering, Leena was clear that she never felt treated differently at Audi Sport or Joest. \u201cI was treated as an equal, but moreover, I was there on merit.\u201d The doubts came mostly from herself: \u201cIt took a couple of years for me to believe in that myself.\u201d After her first win, joining the hybrid test team gave her real influence on how the car was developed, and in 2012 she was driven by one goal: to prove to \u201cliterally everybody on planet Earth\u201d that she wasn\u2019t a one-hit wonder. \u201cI didn\u2019t think about it from a gender point of view. I just thought, \u2018I don\u2019t want anyone to think that this was handed to me.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She has seen the paddock change. Walking through Daytona a few years ago with her German data engineer Svenja Heyer, they noticed female tyre fitters in the Michelin tent and female mechanics and engineers in almost every garage. \u201cThings have really moved on,\u201d Heyer said. \u201cIt\u2019s become much more accessible,\u201d Leena added. She pointed to Hannah Schmitz\u2019s strategy work at Red Bull and to female race engineer Laura M\u00fcller at Haas in Formula 1 as signals to young people of any gender. Encouraging young women is important, she said, but just as important is educating everyone that racing \u201cdoesn\u2019t see gender. You have to just have the best people. Sometimes you have to make a decision with only 80 percent of the information, and if you have the skills to do that, there is a place for you in racing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking ahead, Leena sees AI helping teams process huge amounts of data. That matters more than ever with today\u2019s big Hypercar grid, though she doesn\u2019t expect it to make live strategy calls yet, or to replace a lot of jobs. \u201cWhether it comes and takes over a whole load of jobs, I\u2019m not so sure.\u201d On simulators, she said: \u201cThey are only as good as what you put into them. If you put in junk, you\u2019re gonna get out junk.\u201d Since she started using them seriously at Multimatic around 2019, they have become a key training tool for young engineers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Asked about F1\u2019s current rules, she finds the energy-management challenge familiar from her LMP1 days and interesting from an engineering point of view. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily think that F1 have got it right at the moment,\u201d she said, pointing to the difficult balance between a new mass audience and technical fans, and she notes that the drivers don\u2019t seem to enjoy it much. Talk of going back to combustion engines, however, feels to her \u201ca little bit like they\u2019re looking backwards\u201d. For manufacturers like Audi, under heavy cost pressure at home, it is hard to explain to a board why they should spend millions on technology that doesn\u2019t match their road car range. \u201cYou don\u2019t often see so many V8s on the road now. But it’s the pinnacle of technology in motorsport, so maybe they get away with it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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