Is Toni Breidinger a race car driver who is also a model, or is she a model who is also a race car driver?
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The 26-year-old San Francisco resident has been working her way up the racing ranks the last several years and finally cracked the NASCAR glass ceiling this year, competing in her first full season in the Craftsman Truck Series.
But on the flip side, Breidinger is also an in-demand model for commercials, advertisements, and the like.
She loves doing both, but when asked she is a driver first or a model first, Breidinger is very clear on what drives her.
“Usually when I’m on set, everybody wants to talk about how I’m a race car driver, and it’s not seen as like, oh, she’s a model,” Breidinger told host Shannon Spake in a recent episode of the SpakeUp podcast. “I usually like to lead with that. I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m a race car driver. And you guys tell me what to do, like this (modeling) is not necessarily my space.”
Her dual career can also confuse her personal life, as well.
“It’s funny because I feel like a lot of times before people get to know me in NASCAR motorsports, people don’t really know what to expect,” Breidinger said. “I think maybe they expect a little bit something a little different. But I always say like I’ve been doing this (racing) since I was nine.
“I think a lot of times people think I just kind of woke up one day like a couple years ago and decided to do this because I had a social media following and I was a model before, but I’m like, ‘You know, this started with racing. This was my first love, and it still is.”
Her First Full Season In NASCAR Has Been Rough So Far
Breidinger’s fourth-place finish last season in the ARCA Menards Series earned her a promotion to the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series this season.
But it’s admittedly been a struggle for her in a Truck thus far. In the first 20 races of the 25-race Truck schedule,
Breidinger’s best finish to date has been 18th (Rockingham). All of her other finishes have been 20th or worse, including three DNFs.
Not surprisingly, Breidinger grew up with Danica Patrick as her main inspiration in wanting to become a race car driver.
”I definitely looked at her, and at the time she was racing IndyCar,” Breidinger said. “I do think that helped me think that I could do it because I saw another female doing it. I very much think that seeing is believing, so yeah, I definitely looked up to her.
“Then, as I got older and she retired, I really didn’t have anyone to really look up to. I felt like I never really had much of any mentorship. So a lot of this was kind of just me winging it, and I’ve had really amazing, supportive people on the way. But yeah, a lot of trial and error too for the most part.”
Maybe it was naivete early in her racing career, but she never seemed to notice that motorsports was so male-dominated.
“It’s funny because when I was younger, I was so unaware that I was in such a male-dominated sport,” Breidinger told Spake. “[But that’s also] because I had my twin sister Annie racing with me every weekend, our main mechanic was female also. So, I had, like, this core group of females around me at the racetrack when I was younger that I didn’t really notice it until I was older, like 14 or 15 [years old].
“I think having that core group of females around you is so important. On my teams, if there’s a female on the team, I always tend to gravitate towards them because I just get things that, like, the guys wouldn’t get, just like even unsaid things, emotions and feelings.
“When there’s other females on the team, I definitely think it just makes it so much more comforting.”
