Leena Gade Receives Prestigious Awards in Motorsport

Acknowledgements and Awards

Ingolstadt, December 17, 2012 – Two prizes for Leena Gade: the race engineer of Marcel Fässler, André Lotterer, and Benoît Tréluyer received two awards. On December 7, the ‘C&R Racing Woman in Technology Award’ went to Leena Gade. This award acknowledges successful women who excel in the technical area of motorsport and is presented by the Women in the Winner’s Circle Foundation in the USA, established by former racing driver Lyn St. James. Additionally, the organizers of the FIA World Endurance Championship WEC presented Leena Gade with the ‘Man of the Year’ award on Saturday in Paris.

A Word from Leena Gade

On Winning the FIA World Endurance Championship

You won the FIA World Endurance Championship WEC as engineer with Marcel Fässler, André Lotterer, and Benoît Tréluyer. You have now received awards for this. Were you surprised?

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t expect any of this whatsoever. It was a wonderful surprise and reward for a long and hard season, which we experienced together. However, the World Championship victory was a genuine team effort from every Audi Sport employee and Audi Sport Team Joest. Many thanks to them all.

Changes in Role at Audi Sport

You have filled another role at Audi Sport since the beginning of 2012. What has changed?

Over the last few years, I was a race engineer working at home in Great Britain. This year, I moved over to Germany and work for Audi Sport in Ingolstadt. I’m now integrated more closely in the early development stage of new race cars. On top of my original workload, I also have a lot of organization and development work now. This is interesting, but also a challenge because there is much more work now. I always wanted more responsibility at some point in my career, and this materialized a little earlier than expected.

Reflections on 2012 Le Mans Victory

In 2012 you not only won the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) as engineer with your drivers, but also the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the second time. What was the biggest difference to the win in 2011?

I’ll remember the win at Le Mans in 2012 for completely different reasons than the victory the year before. In 2011, I had a very good feeling throughout the course of the week leading up to the race. This year, we didn’t know just how strong our new opponent Toyota would be. There was healthy competition within our team between start number ‘1’ and the car number ‘2’. I was relieved when the race was finally over. Immediately after the checkered flag fell, I was glad to be completely alone on the pit wall for a few moments. For the first time, my guys and I had taken victory ourselves; the year before, we had received a great deal of support from the teams of the two cars that had retired.