THE MOTOR SPORT INTERVIEW Leena Gade

TEN YEARS AGO, IN 2011, LEENA Gade became the first female race engineer to win the Le Mans 24 Hours when she ran an Audi R18 driven by André Lotterer, Benoît Tréluyer and Marcel Fässler to victory – then did it again in 2012 and for a third time with the same trio in 2014. Such success and the fact she happens to be a woman pushed her into a spotlight not usually reserved for race engineers. Gade, like the majority who have worked with her over the years, just sees herself as a motor sport professional. Gender is an irrelevance to her, although as she has come to grudgingly accept, it might not be to the young girls and women with similar ambitions who have taken inspiration from her example.

Educated in a west London all-girls’ school, Leena and her younger sister Teena have enjoyed rich, varied careers, having grown up with no discernible link to motor sport. Today, Teena is contracting for an autonomous car company having spent time at Prodrive, Skoda and in Formula 1 with Force India and AlphaTauri, while Leena heads up a UK-based vehicle dynamics centre for the Canadian Multimatic firm and continues to race engineer the team’s IMSA DPi contender in the US. Here, we focus on her Audi years and her love affair with Le Mans, the race she remains most associated with.

Motor Sport: You had your first taste of motor racing while at Jaguar – Formula Vee…

Leena Gade: ‘Awesome racing! Jaguar was a really good experience for someone who had never really done anything with cars, but it was apparent really quickly that my time in general automotive was going to be limited. I had this interest in motor sport and met a chap called Alan Harding [of AHS Motorsport, based in Lutterworth]. He was great. He had a small out-building on a farm which had no heating, was packed with Formula Vee cars and had one mechanic. Alan would buy engines from the Brazilian VW factories and tune them on his own dyno. I told him I wanted to learn about race cars and how you put them together, and he said, ‘Can you do some work experience? See if you like it. I can’t pav you.’

“I took two weeks off work. I supported them building up their cars pre-season, went to every race event and ended up doing it for two years while I was at Jaguar, then dovetailed it with data work for a Formula BMW team.”

M How were you drawn to Le Mans and sports car racing?

“I took voluntary redundancy from Jaguar in 2003