The man who traded fighter jets for rally cars, and never looked back
From building BTCC engines to crafting the ultimate Peugeot 205 GTI restomods, Chris Tolman’s journey is one defined by automotive passion and precision
Like all the most satisfying narratives, Chris Tolman’s relationship with cars comes full circle. The seeds of his obsession were planted early when his dad worked at a Peugeot Talbot dealer. Now, his Tolman business is the go-to destination for an obsessive, no-holds-barred 205 restoration.
‘I remember my dad coming home in his works Simca van,’ says Chris. ‘He’d always had an interest in rallying and by the time I was 10, he’d moved to a Lada and Mazda dealer that was rallying successfully in the Lada Challenge. He took me to a rally at Cricket St Thomas on a pouring wet, horrible day. I saw the mechanics there and said, “I want to do that.” He told me there’d be water going in my collar, running down the inside of my overalls and out on my shoe. And that didn’t put me off…
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‘I’d have been 11 years old when he took me to watch the 1986 RAC Rally, one of the very last Group B events. That was the ignition of my T16 thing. To see Juha Kankkunen’s car spit flames was completely mind-blowing. My Peugeot connection began in earnest.’
Chris’s mind was made up – even with deterring voices at home and in school. His dad gave him his first toolbox and taught him the basics of being a mechanic, thus ensuring that once he was old enough to study motor vehicle engineering he was left frustrated by the ease of the work, bunking off classes to spanner local rally cars instead before returning to pass his exams with flying colours. It’s little surprise his first car was acquired in a similarly unorthodox manner.
‘I had this fascination with Talbot Sunbeams. They had a replica rally car at the Great Dorset Steam Fair in 1981. You couldn’t get me out of it! Like my dream job, it was something I had no doubt I would get, I just didn’t know how. I ended up buying parts from the rally world; where other teenagers hid dirty magazines under their bed, I was stowing M16 calipers and Bilsteins. We built a shed in the garden, stripped a car to a bare shell, repaired the rust and then prepped everything before getting it painted.
‘That’s how I ended up driving a Sunbeam when I was 17, all liveried up. It had a 1300 engine so it had no power, but it would go flat-out over everything. I upgraded it to a 1600, which made it too much for the road. Then I discovered girlfriends and was moving out of home, so I ended up getting a sensible Peugeot 309 1.3.’
The Sunbeam stuck around, however, and Tolman’s swelling contacts on the local car scene got his entry fees covered for a year of sprints and hill climbs in it. Life as a professional rally mechanic was still someway off, however. ‘My dad got me a job at a local garage but I hated it; it’s fair to say it was the type of garage that gives mechanics a bad name. I think he wanted me to see that my dream of working on rally cars was exactly that – just a dream. This was the reality.’
It sent Chris back to studying, but any work experience programmes saw him seize a chance to get back underneath a car, while even mundane school projects had enjoyed a rallying twist. ‘I found out that I was quite dyslexic, so everything at school was a problem unless it was with my hands or drawing. I dropped out of business studies to do home economics. I learned to cook and did embroidery. We designed pencil cases and mine was an ’82 Quattro, Shell livery, all embroidered. So I can sew. I’ve been in the Le Mans pits as a mechanic, the team around me in a big flap because we had the wrong patches on all the overalls, and I got the chance to say “Don’t fret!” before sitting there, sewing all the new ones on. No one could believe it.’
Exams completed, Chris was at a crossroads, his disillusionment with the level of car mechanic courses leading him to follow a friend to Boscombe Down for a four-year apprenticeship in the MOD. ‘I won Apprentice of the Year and was invited to Whitehall to present to the secretary of state for defence. Something about the MOD really, really suited me. But again, I applied everything to cars. The final assignment was on piston engines. We were allotted two weeks to strip, inspect and reassemble a Ford Zephyr 6 engine. At the end of day one I went: “Done, Sir.” Most people hadn’t touched an engine and I’d built loads by this point. That allowed me two weeks to do what I liked.
‘I finalised in the design department and the only reason I didn’t stay there was because they amalgamated Farnborough into Boscombe Down and we took in a load of their design people. It meant I ended up on Empire Test Pilots’ School getting the chance to fly attack helicopters and fighter jets. Proper bucket-list stuff.’ Yet even this couldn’t eclipse his passion for cars. Chris was still attending rallies and hillclimbs in the background and in 1999 applied for a job at Prodrive, assigned to its British Touring Car engine department. The workload was a shock after a relatively comfortable job on MOD money, however.
‘The worst was well over a hundred hours in a week. You’d go in at 8am on a Monday and by the time you got to sleep on a Wednesday you’d already finished being paid for the week. But I met some great people and learned so much because of the pressures of the programme. It was very accelerated learning. If you’d have gone to Cosworth at that age, you’d have spent a year building oil pumps or cylinder heads, but at Prodrive you just had to do everything.
‘David Richards still says hello. And I made friends for life, most of us going on to do amazing things in motorsport because of how much we learned there. That Super Touring Mondeo engine was absolutely crazy and it set me up for life [working on it]. I’d been for an interview at Williams F1, but Prodrive had a bigger draw because of their rallying. If I’d taken the job at Williams my life might have been very different.’
While Prodrive were crowned BTCC champions in 2000, the sheer cost of the programme led to job cuts and Chris volunteered to look elsewhere. After briefly accepting a job as a design engineer for sewerage plants – with double his Prodrive salary and a company car – he’d not even clocked in before a friend phoned to say the Ralliart team was looking for mechanics.
‘It was another 18-grand salary but I was fulfilling the dream I’d held since I was ten. My first event was the Rally GB in November 2000, which was mind-blowing. Then by January I was in Monte Carlo.’ While Tolman’s time with Ralliart didn’t coincide with the Mitsubishi Evo’s truly successful period, he loved his near seven years there. ‘It was a big family. Andrew and Linda Cowan didn’t have children, so all their employees were their family. I’ve tried to do the same thing at Tolman. I haven’t been blessed with children and I treat this place like my family.
‘Some years you’d be out of the country six months, which as a young single guy was amazing. I’m so privileged I got to go and see all these things. You didn’t see the countries – you saw airports, docks, service areas. But we had fun. You could go to a nightclub and the Ralliart guys would always be in the red shirts. Subaru were in blue, Hyundai in grey. You could spot us all a mile off.
‘Ralliart was my public school. It was my connections, my ticket to things. Even today you look at various F1 teams and see former Ralliart folk. We get everywhere. Whilst I started off in sub-assembly, there was an opportunity on the test team. So I was involved with the development of the WRC04 car, which was very exciting. After working a lot of hours and doing a lot of things, I was told I had cancer in 2005. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma a week after my 30th birthday, which put a bit of a dampener on things. That resulted in nearly a year off work. But I’ve still got the letters from Andrew Cowan saying, “Chris, don’t worry, your salary is paid every month. You get well and come back.” I didn’t have to worry about losing my job.
‘I tried to break the record for the fastest recovery from a bone marrow transplant and missed out by a couple of hours. I was gutted, but they wouldn’t let me out of hospital. I came out on the Saturday and had the opportunity to go to Race Retro at Stoneleigh Park to see Michèle Mouton driving a Sport Quattro. I thought, “I’m never going to see that again.” I’d been in hospital for two months and I could barely walk, so my mates hired me a scooter to get around on.’
It’s not the only opportunity Chris seized from trauma. After returning to work from a recurrence of his cancer, Ralliart announced its closure. ‘There were all of these amazing people being made redundant. At the time I was going for a blood test every week. I’d had more than 12 months off work. If I applied for a job, I wasn’t going to be a great proposition, so it felt the right time to start my own business. If it all failed, I could go back to working on aeroplanes. I had a generous, albeit small sum of money from redundancy. That’s what I started Tolman Motorsport Ltd with at the end of 2007.
‘I never went into business to make a lot of money. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I wanted to follow the legacy of Andrew Cowan and how he ran things. I didn’t set out to go circuit racing on the scale that we have. I just always tried to do the best job that we could, the most engineering-led solution. It was never about the cheapest price.’
This attitude earned contracts with Ginetta and then McLaren, Tolman running the Woking firm’s Driver Development Programme and a trio of 570S GT4 cars in British GT. But then world events conspired to give Chris’s story another turning point. ‘Covid hit us big. McLaren pulled the plug, so we had to pull the plug on people, which is exceptionally hard because it feels like family.’
The circle of life resolved itself and brought Chris back to his original passion for small, quick Peugeots. ‘There was no business plan to it. I started buggering around restoring a 205 GTI. I hawked it around to journalists and people loved it. Our car aired on Top Gear on a Sunday night and we launched our Tolman Edition car on the Monday morning. The internet melted and our Facebook went mad. The rest is history, as they say. I never thought for one minute we’d sell 25 of them, but we nearly have.’
The parallels are too perfect to gloss over. ‘I still remember the launch night of the original 205 GTI because my dad was working late,’ he says, while a recent part-sourcing mission in Europe emotionally reunited Chris with the Kankkunen 205 T16 that dilated his young pupils on the RAC stages almost 40 years ago. A cocooning Range Rover wafted him across the continent on that particular trip. ‘I haven’t got a collection, although I’ve got a few cars,’ he smiles. A works rally rep 205 sits alongside his grey-on-red 2007 Maserati GranTurismo and a more rugged Mitsubishi Shogun, those ties to his Ralliart days truly binding.
‘My biggest achievement is not the cars, it’s the people. I was at the first round of the World Endurance Championship last year and I saw seven people that had worked for me. They all said hello. My dream was to get into motorsport, work for a factory team and travel the world – and now they’re doing the same. We’re all getting paid to do the stuff that we love. It doesn’t get better than that, does it?’
This story was first featured in evo issue 333.
