The remarkable career of a 'classy' champion who rejected politics

When 2011 DTM champion Martin Tomczyk announced in December that he was hanging up his helmet after two decades as a professional driver, the many tributes from former team-mates and rivals struck similar chords. They remarked how it had been a pleasure to work with the 40-year-old Bavarian, their respect obvious.

As Tomczyk’s regular GT co-driver Nicky Catsburg puts it: “If you are Jens Marquardt [the former BMW Motorsport boss] or Nicky Catsburg, he will be straight, whether he likes something or dislikes something.”

Another BMW stalwart, Augusto Farfus, labels Tomczyk as “one of the best team-mates I ever had” and welcomed his apolitical approach. “He never played behind you,” says the Brazilian, and that’s a point Tom Kristensen also identifies from his time alongside Tomczyk with Audi in the DTM between 2004 and 2009.

“Martin always came across as really a well-educated, well-behaved man that you can trust from the first handshake,” states the Danish great.

Put this to Tomczyk, who has joined DTM promoter ITR as the championship manager for its GT4-based DTM Trophy support series, and he makes no bones that he “never liked political games”.

“I always tried to avoid it, I wanted that everyone is straightforward to me,” he explains.

Tomczyk arrived in the DTM with Audi stalwart Abt Sportsline in 2001, together with future double champion Mattias Ekstrom. But, while the Swede already had extensive tin-top experience – he’d won his domestic touring car championship in 1999 – Tomczyk had just two years of Formula BMW and a single season in Formula 3 under his belt.

Tomczyk began his DTM career in 2001 with Audi TT

Photo by: Motorsport Images

It was a steep learning curve that Tomczyk found “really hard at the beginning”. Still, he found that Abt afforded the driver nicknamed ‘one-lap wonder’ “the time that I needed to grow”.

“I was really quick in qualifying and I messed it up every time in the race,” he chuckles. “That changed completely in these [last] 20 years. At the beginning I did everything out of the heart, floored it and tried to get it right. I did not use the brain that much!

"If you always had the role as a wingman, it’s quite difficult then to step forward and say, 'Now I’m the guy'" Martin Tomczyk

“I had team-mates like Tom [Kristensen], [Laurent] Aiello, [Christian] Abt at that time, [Karl] Wendlinger, [Heinz-Harald] Frentzen, [Frank] Biela was there as well. There were so many good drivers who had so much knowledge and I tried to get all the input I could. I picked out everything and tried to combine it in myself.”

By 2004 Tomczyk was fighting for wins, only losing out to Kristensen at Oschersleben through the pitstop phases.

“In all areas he was strong,” remembers the nine-time Le Mans winner. “He was all-round a very good driver and this showed later when he won the championship. When he had the right surroundings, it could definitely work for him. He was a top performer in the DTM, and he won [in 2011] when he was ready for it.

“Probably Mattias was a little bit faster to mature, his experience in touring cars helped him when Martin came, so he [Tomczyk] was just a few small steps behind in that sense. It took him a little bit longer to produce the results. But I had him as a level performer already from my first season.”

But Tomczyk had to wait until Barcelona 2006 for the floodgates to open and often found himself typecast as a wingman for his team-mates, a role he found difficult to shake. He admits to being “a bit naive” to assume that his willingness to follow team orders would always be reciprocated by his team-mates - although he does owe his second win, at Zandvoort in 2007, to the compliance of stablemate Alexandre Premat.

Kristensen rates former team-mate Tomczyk highly

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“I never denied any radio call, I always did what they told me I had to do and obviously I was hoping that they do the same,” he remembers. “If you always had the role as a wingman, it’s quite difficult then to step forward and say, ‘Now I’m the guy’. That happened then in 2011 when they brought me into another team [Phoenix] because I was number one there and I could do what I wanted to do. But I couldn’t [at Abt], I was in a little cage.”

Tomczyk admits he was “super-shocked” when he was told of his impending demotion for 2011 to a year-old car by Audi motorsport boss Wolfgang Ullrich: “I couldn’t believe it. For me it was clear – my career is done.”

At first, Tomczyk and Phoenix concentrated on being the best year-old package. But with a 25kg weight break relative to those in current-spec cars, and new Hankook tyres that had a wider operating range than the outgoing Dunlops, Tomczyk soon emerged as a title contender.

After taking victory at the Red Bull Ring, the first for Phoenix since its time running Opels in 2000, he ended a five-year Lausitzring Audi win drought, the car responding to him so perfectly that he “drove with two fingers. The times when you can just drive away without struggling with anything, that was perhaps three or four times in my whole career.”

He won again in the wet at Brands Hatch, but it was only after a dramatic recovery from 14th to second at Oschersleben that Tomczyk allowed himself to believe. Reflecting on the year, he says: “It made me complete as a race driver. It was a very important year, to be the underrated driver and the underrated team, and to flip this whole situation. Being the first-ever guy who won the DTM championship in last year’s car is also something special.”

He joined BMW for its 2012 DTM return – “I just wanted to see something different,” he explains – and was an important cog as the marque won the title at its first attempt with Bruno Spengler. Farfus, a DTM newcomer that year, found the reigning champion a consummate team player.

“He’s a big guy, a big name, but he always played it with a lot of class,” recalls the 2013 runner-up. “Martin never came in saying, ‘I’m the champion, my rules, I’m the man’.”

DTM title came with Team Phoenix in 2011 despite demotion to an older-spec car

Photo by: Motorsport Images

BMW switched from its M3 to the M4 model for 2014, and Tomczyk concedes that his fit with the new machine was “not that good”. He requested a shift into endurance racing, initially joining BMW’s IMSA assault in 2017 as a precursor to its short-lived World Endurance Championship programme. Endurance racing brought a new lease of life.

“I was always trying to get the team together to have fun next to the competition,” he smiles. “It was sometimes hard, but for me it was always a key for success to have team-mates who know you and talk straightforward to you. That made events like Le Mans or Nurburgring that much more special. We tried to perform, but we wanted to have fun doing it.”

Those efforts brought admiration from his team-mates for his character, but they admired his on-track prowess too. Tomczyk’s reputation as a first-lap demon – “He started if not every race, I think 98%!” remarks Farfus – earned him a new nickname from Catsburg.

"When you still can achieve whatever other drivers can achieve on the race track, everyone thinks, ‘Why do you stop?’ But there is a time where you are not that fast anymore, where you ruin your name, and this I didn’t want" Martin Tomczyk

“I call him ‘Startin’,” jokes the Dutchman. “When I did WEC with him, I never did a start. Everyone knew that whatever we do, Martin is starting the race. He keeps delivering and we’re always like, ‘Ah, he’s lucky’. But when you do it for multiple years, you must be doing something right.”

Catsburg pinpoints Tomczyk’s strength as managing his car over a stint, citing him as “very good in traffic and in tyre management. Put him in the race, anywhere, and he would be pretty much the strongest guy in the team. Even last year, in GT World Challenge, it was like that. He was teaching the young guys how to do it.”

Farfus identifies Tomczyk’s self-confidence and calmness as important traits.

“He knew the race was where he was at his best and he knew that the start was his place,” he says. “In GT times, I think he has never lost a position in lap one. I am pretty sure Martin in an average of his opening laps has always made minimum two or three places.”

Tomczyk was renowned as a start demon after switching to GT racing

Photo by: Andreas Beil

His decision to stop caught Catsburg by surprise, but Tomczyk says it was the culmination of “a long process”. Given his father Hermann’s history in governance – he has held senior roles in German motorsport federation the DMSB and the FIA – perhaps it was to be expected that his future would be in management.

“The last two years I was figuring out what could I do if I stop racing,” he reflects. “I was always focused on driving, but the last years while driving I was thinking, ‘Why do they not do it like that?’ because it would make a much better outcome for fans.”

After rebuffing ITR boss Gerhard Berger’s first approach in 2020, Tomczyk decided that the time was right last year since he’d reached a point of saturation with the politics involved in competition – although not without a pang of sadness; he’d finished just nine seconds shy of the race-winning Porsche in the Nurburgring 24 Hours.

“I felt super-happy when I raced with my mates, when I was in the car I was still quick, and I really enjoyed it,” he declares.

“But I mainly enjoyed it when I was behind the wheel. When I jumped out and all the political things were going on… I said, ‘I don’t want to stand it anymore’. When you still can achieve whatever other drivers can achieve on the race track, everyone thinks, ‘Why do you stop?’ But there is a time where you are not that fast anymore, where you ruin your name, and this I didn’t want. I wanted to step back before that point came along.”

In that, and in many other respects, he certainly succeeded.

Tomczyk retired while still at the top of his game and with the widespread respect of his peers

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz

The lost Le Mans win chance

Under different circumstances, Martin Tomczyk could have won the 2010 Le Mans 24 Hours. He had been lined up by Joest Racing for 2009 to join Audi’s LMP1 project with the unloved R15, and in February that year he took part in a shootout at Vallelunga in an R10.

“I did a whole day testing – they just wanted to see if I am capable to do whatever they want and what they expect at Le Mans,” recalls Tomczyk. “I was quite quick because I knew the car – I did already some tests with the car and I could fulfil everything. In the evening I remember they came to me and said, ‘You are the guy we want to work with in Le Mans’. I was super-happy.”

But, one week later, Audi completed a U-turn. Joest was permitted to use Porsche factory drivers Timo Bernhard and Romain Dumas, at Tomczyk’s expense: “And suddenly I was out!”

The following year, Bernhard and Dumas won at Le Mans with Audi DTM regular Mike Rockenfeller, setting a new distance record that still stands.

"The pace at Le Mans in the first year was awesome and I’m sure, if we didn’t run into a technical issue with the suspension, we would really have a chance to win" Martin Tomczyk

Tomczyk’s belated Le Mans bow came in 2018 as part of BMW’s short-lived World Endurance Championship GTE Pro campaign with the bulky M8, a car he believed had good potential.

“It was a good car actually, it was just a little big!” he says. “It was built to perform at Le Mans. The pace at Le Mans in the first year was awesome and I’m sure, if we didn’t run into a technical issue with the suspension, we would really have a chance to win.”

The 2018-19 WEC ‘superseason’ included two visits to Le Mans and, with the technical issues ironed out, Tomczyk was optimistic of success.

“But [BMW] said before Le Mans we will retire from WEC and not come back,” he says. “You know how it is – we had no chance at all, BoP-wise. They just drove away on the straight. I said, ‘Guys, we have a massive problem this year’. It could have been much more successful.”

Le Mans experiences with M8 GTE were thwarted by suspension problems and BoP respectively

Photo by: Andreas Beil