Toni Breidinger saw her future. “My dream when I was in middle school was to be a race car driver and a Victoria’s Secret model.” Now 26, the Californian professional NASCAR driver and IMG model has achieved both — and she’s only just getting started.
Breidinger got her taste for speed at age nine. “I literally don’t remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday, but I remember the moment that I got in my first go-kart so vividly,” she said. As a kid, she and her twin sister had hobbies and played other sports, but nothing clicked like motorsports. Taking lessons at the go-kart track with a handful of other nine-year-olds, the instructors quickly saw Breidinger’s taste for speed. She didn’t know anything about NASCAR or other world-famous racing series at the time; this was pure love at first ignition. “Hitting the throttle for the first time, turning the wheel, and just that sensation of freedom and independence and speed,” she recalled. “The instructor was hyping me up saying I was the fastest one.”
With five years of go-karting under her belt, a USAC Western US Asphalt Midget championship win, and a move from open-wheel to stock-car racing, Breidinger got her debut in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2025 — an exciting but challenging learning curve for the series rookie.
Not only is she one of very few women on the track, she’s also the first female Arab-American to compete in NASCAR. And that dream of becoming a Victoria’s Secret model? That also came to fruition, in 2022. “I have this unlimited confidence,” she said. “I have this kind of alter ego when I’m in my race suit at the track.” It helps keep her focused on her own race for success — a race whose track she’s laying as she races it.
SUCCESS OFF THE TRACK
The alter ego is useful in many ways for Breidinger. An influential figure on social media, she’s not just a race car driver, she’s also a model, brand ambassador and fast-moving billboard. It’s because of Breidinger that major fashion and beauty brands like Huda Beauty, Coach and Victoria’s Secret have appeared in the motorsports space and, in turn, helped build Breidinger’s authentic personal brand and online fan base. “These are brands that I actually use and wear, so I feel like that’s why the partnerships make sense.”
FUNDING HER FUTURE
They’ve also provided financial support — without her brand sponsors, Breidinger would not be able to race competitively. “I’ve always had a love for social media,” she said, but, “I 100% leverage that to get partners and to raise funding. That’s why I put so much emphasis on it.” While Breidinger aligns with every one of her partnerships, and strongly values the social content she puts out on the daily, the need to be visible in this way is work, and it isn’t always easy.
Not all of her fans understand that it’s part of the job. Regularly, Breidinger fields prescriptive comments telling her to “‘focus less on social media like XYZ drivers,’” not realizing it’s a financial privilege to focus on driving — a privilege Breidinger doesn’t have. “But I think about it and when I do succeed and accomplish all the things I want to accomplish, it’s just gonna feel that much better.”
EXPANDING THE EXPOSURE OF WOMEN IN MOTORSPORTS
Breidinger also gets a lot of support from other women in the sport. From fellow race car drivers to engineers and reporters, “so many of them have reached out to me to say congratulations on certain partnerships,” she said. They understand that Breidinger is increasing visibility for female drivers, which means enticing a new genre of brand partners and creating ways for female race car drivers to flourish in the future. “Seeing is believing,” she said. “I want to get as many eyeballs on the sport as possible, to inspire endless amounts of females and people of color to get into the sport. I want the most exposure possible for myself, but also for the sport.”
While she doesn’t race in a single-seater series — otherwise known as Formula racing — Breidinger is a big advocate of F1 Academy, an all-female series designed by Formula 1 to funnel women into the lower Formula racing championships and the UK series GB3. “There’s so many different racing disciplines, and the more conversations, the better,” she said. Like NASCAR, one of the most famous of the racing series, which is currently completely male dominated. But given the growing media focus on F1 Academy following the dedicated Netflix documentary series produced by Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine, Breidinger hopes to see this change, too. “Especially on an international level,” she said. “Hopefully, I can help be the driving force to change that a bit.”
FINDING BALANCE
It’s all about trusting the process, both on the macro and the micro levels. The day before arriving in Brooklyn earlier this summer for her PLAYERS photo shoot, Breidinger was racing in Watkins Glen. “My suitcase got stolen on the morning of race day. I was like, ‘You know what, this day can’t get any worse.’” But it did. While running one of her best races to date, her car caught fire. “Like full flames.”
Her only option was to shift gears, mentally, and return to the process: “I was like, ‘Next step is going to Brooklyn for this photo shoot.’” She’d get to play a character, which was the perfect kind of escape. “I’ve really told myself to trust the process. Sometimes the process gets hard to trust, but we are trusting it.”
In hindsight, she knows that her dreams of becoming a race car driver and a model were unrealistic: “The odds of either of those happening were very slim to none.” And yet, “for some reason, I always had this inner belief that I’d be able to do it.” Her success so far offers a lesson she won’t easily forget. If anything, her goals are even loftier now, which makes her odds even slimmer and her conviction that much stronger. Of course, there are disbelievers. “They think they know what I’m capable of, but they don’t. Only I do.”
