Toni Breidinger's Double Life

Twenty-five-year-old Toni Breidinger opened May racing in the SpeedyCash.com 250 at Texas Motor Speedway. One hundred and sixty-seven laps later, the NASCAR driver racing for Tricon Garage said goodbye to Fort Worth, Texas, trading in one racing locale for another—Miami, Florida. The following day, step-and-repeat photos of Breidinger were proof of her double life. While there, she stopped by a WhatsApp x Mercedes-AMG Formula One event before heading to a cocktail party for one of her brand partners. One day later, she walked the F1 pit lane alongside Suni Lee at the Miami Grand Prix wearing a butter-yellow minidress, white handbag, and elegant racing watch. In addition to being a rising star on the racetrack, Breidinger is a model, walking the pink carpet at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, attending New York Fashion Week, and, most recently, starring in Coach's new Soho Sneaker campaign.

During her day job, the San Francisco native works with her team to fight for positions in NASCAR's Truck Series, doing exactly what she's wanted to do since she was 9 and her father took her and her sister go-karting for the first time—driving for a living. But racing was just one of her goals. "Growing up, my dream was always to be a race-car driver," Breidinger tells me a few days before heading to Texas for last weekend's race. "But I wanted to be a model too." For her, finding a way to juggle the two was always the mission. "It's kind of crazy how both worlds ended up colliding and working out for me," she continues. "They oddly go hand in hand."

Though racing in NASCAR and modeling are "polar opposites," Breidinger says they also come together a lot more than people might think. "I've been able to [naturally] leverage both," she says. Unlike in other sports like basketball and soccer, drivers need to pay to play if they want to get their cars on track, whether they drive in NASCAR, IndyCar, or F1. "You need partners to work with you and believe in you so you can get that seat time and you can progress through your career," she says. "I've been able to build a following and work with so many amazing brands on the modeling side, and all that goes back into my racing." Without sponsors, Breidinger knows she'd never be able to continue driving.

This is especially true when you consider the pay disparity between men and women in sports. An obvious example of this can be found in professional basketball, where last year's number-one pick in the WNBA Draft, NCAA women's basketball phenom Caitlin Clark, secured a starting salary of $76,000, according to ESPN. Her male counterpart, French star Victor Wembanyama? He started his NBA career with a salary of $12.2 million. According to Axios, Clark's entire 2024 WNBA team combined will get paid about the same as one random bench NBA player. The same inequality exists in motorsport, where, historically, very few women have been able to compete at all. Why? "We are underfunded," Breidinger says.

Rather than letting that be a point of defeat for her, though, Breidinger saw her role as a woman in a male-dominated sport as an opportunity. Whereas so many of her male counterparts are competing for the same sponsorship deals, Breidinger has gone after brands that are geared more toward women. "We have brands that we can work with that the male athletes can't work with," she says. "It's important to get those brands that cater to a female demographic to support us because they really can push us through our space." Plus, it gives brands that would typically be shut out of the motorsport ecosystem entry. Suddenly, they can be involved in a sport that draws millions of TV viewers by having a female athlete to work with. And then there are the fans. "The fans are so passionate and so loyal, especially NASCAR fans," Breidinger says. "If we have a brand supporting me, I instantly see people saying, 'I'm gonna go get Raising Cane's because Toni likes Raising Cane's.'"

With that said, it's no surprise that so many brands are bringing Breidinger into the fold, selecting her for major campaigns and inviting her to attend their events. Coach is one such brand. "With the launch of our Coach Soho Sneaker, we wanted to tell a different kind of story," says Joon Silverstein, the brand's chief marketing officer, in a press release. "Not about hype. Not about status. Not about collecting. But about real life—and what consumers want from a sneaker today." The style was designed to be customized to fit each wearer's needs and lifestyle, no matter what that entails.

Given her multifaceted career, Breidinger connected with this concept at a core level. She needs her sneakers to be as versatile as she is. "I'm always wearing different things—I have many aesthetics," she says. "At the track, I usually wear oversize clothes, like vintage NASCAR jackets and tees with jeans, and I think the [Soho] sneakers are perfect for that." Away from racing, though, she says she likes to style them with a tennis skirt or sundress. "There are so many ways to go about it," she tells me. "They've been in my suitcase for every single trip I've gone on recently."

It's not just that they're easy to style. The Soho Sneakers are also all about self-expression. Coach's customers, according to Silverstein, desire sneakers that "adapt to the many expressions of who they are," she says in the release. Her team chose the campaign's stars to reflect this direction, tapping talents who are shaping culture in individual ways and taking their Soho Sneakers on new, untraveled routes. As someone who's never taken the most traveled path in her career(s), Breidinger was a perfect fit. Not only is she a woman in NASCAR—a sport that, according to Sporting News, has only seen about 75 women compete across its top three divisions: the Cup Series, Xfinity Series, and Truck Series—but she's also the first Arab American woman to race in a national series. For reference, there is no exact count of the number of men who've competed in these series, but one reference site, Racing Reference, put it at 19,732.

"When you start accumulating first this and first that, it's like, 'Oh, I guess I was the first one,'" Breidinger says. "You don't realize that you're the first because, in my mind, I'm not thinking, 'Oh, I want to be the first female to do this or the first female to do that.' I'm just doing my thing." Embracing her journey and not comparing it to anyone else's is what's gotten her to where she is today. "When I was younger, I used to compare my journey to a lot of people," she says. "Once I was able to truly embrace myself and the path I'm on, I was able to grow so much more."

Knowing who she is now has given Breidinger the confidence to be herself, something she was excited to do with her Soho Sneakers. "The sneakers themselves are such a great [mode] of self-expression," Breidinger says. This being her rookie season in NASCAR, she tells me that self-expression is one of her top priorities as she breaks into the series. Unlike in F1, the NASCAR paddock isn't always the most fashionable place. Guests aren't arriving in off-the-runway pieces, nor are the series' drivers. With fashion being such a big part of Breidinger's life and work, it's important to her to bring that side of her to the track in whatever ways she can. "I love making the pit road my runway," she says. "For the most part, I'm in my suit and helmet, which I am heavily involved in [designing] and get some self-expression from that, but I love pulling up with different outfits."

At a recent race in Las Vegas, Nevada, Breidinger arrived at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway wearing her Soho Sneakers with a vintage-inspired jersey with her team's name on it, black trousers, and a Raising Cane's trucker hat. At an International Women's Month event at a track in Phoenix, Arizona, she donned the same hat with a retro-looking leather racing jacket. "It's so perfect that racing and NASCAR vintage apparel is cool right now in the fashion scene," Breidinger says. "My two worlds are colliding—I get to wear my racing [gear] and still be up with the trends." Plus, by wearing what makes her feel confident and ready for lights out, she hopes that she'll inspire others to do the same instead of sticking to NASCAR's normal dress code. "Sometimes, you just need one person to break the norm and dress the way [they] want and express [themselves] to make other people feel more comfortable to do it too," she says. Sure, some might be fine with the way it is and has been, but for anyone who's abiding by set-in-stone dressing codes just because they don't want to be the first to stray or don't think they can pull off another look, Breidinger wants to offer an alternative. "I think anybody can wear anything they want and pull it off just as well as anybody," she says. "For me, at least, the better I feel about myself, the better I perform. It goes hand in hand."

Everything about Breidinger's double life—part-time model, part-time race-car driver—just clicks. It's what works for her. "I have so many different personalities," she says. "Me at the racetrack is so different from the Toni that's on set modeling, and it's fun to live out both of those sides of myself." Racing gives her adrenaline and pressure, healthily feeding her competitiveness. At the same time, modeling, she says, is more of a mild atmosphere. "I love working with people who are creative," she continues. Her dual careers are the ultimate scale. They balance her out, helping Breidinger perform her best at all times—no matter the stress or chaos doing both sometimes entails. (See: her travel itinerary at the beginning of May.) More literally, juggling is the only viable financial option for Breidinger, as a woman in sports, if she wants to continue doing the things she's loved since childhood. "I would not be racing without modeling, and I honestly wouldn't be modeling without my racing," she says. Then again, with jobs like Coach's Not Just for Walking Soho Sneaker campaign, a new racing partnership with Kendall Jenner's 818 Tequila, and more on the cards for 2025, Breidinger would never dream of giving up either, even if she could.