Toby Trice: PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES
Wannabe pilot turned train driver Toby Trice is targeting the Le Mans 24 Hours race on a very different type of track
“Adrenalin takes over and your focus and your spider senses come in, almost”
Some people are just born to go fast. There is something within them that is attracted to those forces acting upon the body, and the machines that deliver them.
Toby Trice is one of them.
The Deal daredevil has hit pole position in the media stakes in recent months, appearing on television and in advertising campaigns to promote both his ambition for track success but also an issue that drove him to racing in the first place.
“Racing has always been in my family as far back as I can remember,” says Toby. “My grandad and I used to watch F1 together and when I was older my uncle started dirt racing at a local track. I got the racing bug at a very early age from being around tracks and the energy that it brings.
“I always knew I wanted to race myself, but I could never really afford to.”
A little more than four years ago, Toby and his fiancée Katie entered into a period of fertility treatment, something that was to prove a catalyst for the racer.
“That was a really tough time, going through the challenges of IVF treatment,” says Toby, who is now an ambassador for the Fertility Network UK charity.
“It was a real trigger point for me. I wandered down to Buckmore Park circuit in Kent (famous for its alumni including the likes of Lewis Hamilton) purely as a way to escape from the infertility issues we were going through. It was also a way of scratching the itch of racing.
“I was racing go-karts for the best part of three years, just as something to do with a few friends once a month to relieve stress. But I got good quite quickly and was racing against some of the guys who had been racing all their lives.
“Within a relatively short space of time, I was racing and getting podium finishes and wins.”Having bagged Buckmore Park’s Driver’s Driver of the Year title, Toby’s talent was spotted and he was approached by now-sponsor SVG Motorsport, which invited him to Brands Hatch to test out his skills behind the wheel of a racing car.
“It has been a complete whirlwind,” says Toby, who made his debut in the Ginetta Racing Drivers Club (GRDC) championship last summer.
“It’s a novice championship made up of drivers who have minimal racing experience and it’s a way to introduce drivers to the world of car-racing. So some do it as a bit of fun because they can, others like myself enter into this championship as a way to find out if they can actually race.
“I was fortunate enough that I was a sponsored driver and the guy that picked me up to test his race car offered me the drive to represent his company. That’s how I got the car and got the seat this year.
“The racing costs are very expensive and it wasn’t something I could afford to do on my own. So that’s when I approached my sponsors.”
SWAPPING TRACKS FOR TRACKS
The 28-year-old has been a train driver for Southeastern in Kent for the past five years and been at the helm of the 140mph High Speed 1 trains for the past two.
Now a key sponsor for the racing car, Southeastern partnered Toby to support both his career as a train driver and a fledgling motorsport competitor. But speed has always been the goal.
“I actually trained to be an airline pilot when younger, but that fell through early on. Trains were my next goal and it was great to get there,” says Toby.
“I’m proud to drive on Britain’s fastest railway but to also have my employer with me as a sponsor at the race track.”
I expect a dismissive laugh when asking if there are any skills relatable from driving trains to cars, but surprisingly Toby believes there are.
“I think so,” he says. “There are definitely a lot of skills that transfer. It’s a completely different scenario, of course, but in terms of concentration and preparation, and the key skills you need over a specific length of time, they definitely transfer.”
British handmade car manufacturer Ginetta specialises in racing cars and hosts a ladder of championships that have a very attractive final goal: the Le Mans 24 Hours race in France (as seen recently in the film with Matt Damon and Christian Bale).
“You can graduate and gain promotion into whichever championship you feel you could race competitively within,” explains Toby. “If you’re part of the Ginetta family, you’re essentially learning all of their cars as you rank up, as you prepare yourself to potentially compete for them in the Le Mans 24 Hours.
“So there are a lot of opportunities: it’s a really cool system, with each car designed to teach the driver the fundamentals of racing.
“The car we raced this year was all about understanding mechanical grip and really refining how much you can get out of the tyres you have available. It’s quite a challenge but makes for really close races as it’s all down to the drivers’ ability – no one has got any technical advantages.”
In the 2019 season, a first-race collision proved the catalyst for an impressive debut campaign for Toby: “I was really disappointed, but it was unavoidable – I got collected up and was one of the cars that span and ended up at the back of the grid.”
When asked if he ever gets scared in those situations, Toby is bullish.
“No, if you had fear, you wouldn’t do it,” he says. “You’re racing nearly a tonne’s worth of car, at high speeds, very close to each other. Of course you understand the risks of racing, you put your life in danger sometimes, because it is a dangerous sport. But I never have fear. Adrenalin takes over and your focus and your spider senses come in, almost. And nothing else matters except trying to win.”
Finishing every race in the top five from then on, including three podium positions, Toby “shook a few feathers” in his first year. But there is far more to come.
This year, he has plans to go up two tiers and make the Ginetta GT5 Challenge and continue his journey, which has so far seen him race at the likes of the world-famous Silverstone circuit.
“That was an incredible experience,” says Toby. “Some of my idols have raced and won championships there.”
The racer will also graduate from seven race weekends to 18 in 2020.
“It’s a much more full-on championship with a lot more pressure and challenges. I will be racing against some of the country’s best, so it will be great to see how I compare.”
Toby freely admits that at the beginning of the year the goal was just to have a year racing and tick it off the bucket list. But that changed pretty quickly.
“I never really saw myself going further on. But [three weekends into the season] it was quite quickly apparent my race team were talking to me about my potential. I shrugged it off, almost. But more and more race teams were coming up to me and talking about going further into racing. It became a more serious thing.
“Now my goal is to race at Le Mans, which seems like a mad thing to say. But my peers racing with me believe I have got what it takes to race at the 24 Hours. So that’s my goal. Which is bonkers.”