20/24 #6: Audi R18 TDI (chassis #106)
Chosen by: Leena Gade
Best finish: 1st, 2011
Team: Audi Sport Team Joest
Driven by: Benoit Tréluyer, Marcel Fässler, Andre Lotterer

Winning Le Mans is hard. It’s really, really hard. But if you’re Benoit Tréluyer, Marcel Fässler, or Andre Lotterer, it’s apparently not as hard as you think. The trio won three out of four Le Mans from 2011 to 2014, and in the process became Le Mans legends.

Quietly, from a little plastic shed on the pit wall, a British woman played a large part in orchestrating each of those victories.

“If I was to nominate one car, it would be the 2011 Audi R18,” says Leena Gade, race engineer for each of the trio’s wins. “It was Audi’s first closed-top car, which opened up the aerodynamic development and set the tone for the evolution into hybrids in FIA WEC. But above all, it brought us that first win together. Hard to beat that!”

Gade has good reason to like the Audi R18. All three wins were achieved with various iterations of the car, with the non-hybrid 2011 version – the car’s debut – being their first. 2011 was particularly trying. By the ninth hour, theirs was the only Audi still in the race. Enormous crashes had seen their team-mates eliminated, but Tréluyer, Fässler, Lotterer, Gade and the rest of the Joest Audi team rallied and won by just 13 and a bit seconds.

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