IndyCar legend Scott Dixon has previously made the case that oval racing is a unique discipline in itself, and this is something Gade found first time during her time in the States, first at Phoenix and then Indianapolis.

“With oval racing, if you haven’t got any experience in it, you have to learn what kind of changes you make, and then sort of what impact they have,” she explains

“Track racing to some extent is very forgiving. So if you make a toe change, for example, you can be a little bit out and the car is relatively forgiving, the driver can adapt to it quite quickly.

“But with oval racing, if you get that slightly wrong – for example making a change even marginally bigger than 1mm or 2mm – the impact for a driver is huge, and it’s just massive on oval, it’s amplified way more.”

Gade emphasises how sensitive those working on an ovals have to be to the environment they’re working in.

This was evident earlier this year at IndyCar’s Texas round, when Josef Newgarden appeared fastest in cooler conditions but momentum swung towards Pato O’Ward whenever the sun emerged.

“A lot of oval racing is about what’s coming,” Gade says. “Knowing what ambient changes are coming along, so that you can adapt the car.

“It’s [the car] not always in the [optimum performance] window, it gets into the window at a certain phase of a race or a qualifying session. You’ve almost got to be able to know what to change to make that happen.”

Gade also explains how it isn’t just engineers who need to be wary of incremental changes – drivers need to be sensitive to the jeopardy, as one of Schmidt’s drivers learned that year.

“Robert Wickens was a rookie coming in. When he had a moment on track, especially on an oval, they would pull him straight in and he’d be like, ‘What did you do that for? I was fine.’

“And they’d say, ‘Yeah, but that was a big moment. You got away with it, but we need to understand why it happened.’”

After years of success at Le Mans, Gade would find the world of IndyCar racing tough to adjust to.

As a precaution with just five races of the season gone, she shadowed a more experienced team member for her first Indy 500, but it ended in disaster anyway, with the driver on her side of the garage, James Hinchcliffe, failing to qualify. Gade left the squad after that race.

It got worse for the team later that year when Wickens was severely injured in a crash at Pocono’s tri-oval, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.

After all of this, Gade says her respect for the oval racing discipline is undimmed.

“There’s people who have been doing IndyCar racing for decades, and are still learning and still perfecting what they’re doing,” she says.

“I have the utmost respect for what they do, and not just IndyCar racing, we’re talking about NASCAR too. To have that knowledge pool, that gaining of that information, knowing what to do – it doesn’t just happen, you can’t read a book, you can’t just simulate it.

“That’s not how it works. You have to be there, kind of adapting to it and learning it.”