From Race Engineer to Entrepreneur to Autocrosser.

I am Mauricio Toro, I’m 39 and I live near Daytona. Racing has been in my life since very early. I grew up to my dad talking about the incredible road races that took place in my native Colombia in the 70’s and 80’s and how he helped tune his friends’ cars for those events. 

It’s not a surprise then that when I was old enough, I decided to try my hand at karting. To my dad’s credit, he insisted that I learn how to work on my own karts. He also insisted I find sponsorship money and that he’d match it, and this has greatly formed my way of looking at life. Through friendships I forged during my teen years, I learned about setting up a go-kart, aligning it, tuning those finicky two-stroke engines, and yeah when I had some time, I actually drove the things. I was never very good, but I had the odd heroic win under my belt. 

Then, when I graduated high school, I had to face the reality that I didn’t have the talent or the backing to make it as a professional racer, so I decided to go into engineering with the sole focus of being an engineer in racing. I sold my kart and my trailer and started studying mechanical engineering in Medellin. While I was a student, I became a co-driver in rally racing and had some success in the Colombia Rally-Raid Championship which was at its peak at the time. 

Later I got a scholarship to get a double degree in France, and I was very lucky to land in the school I did. The school had a student program that ran a Yamaha R1 motorcycle in the World Endurance Championship. This was a volunteer program and the bikes were built and worked on by a group of current and former students of the school. I got to work with them on vehicle dynamics and suspension tuning. I actually installed the first data logger on the bike and got to follow the team around to test and race.

While in the school we also started the “Trophee SIA” which was a French version of formula student, only the cars we built were two seaters and they were raced on large circuits. I was part of the team and we came back with the performance and safety awards.

After graduating in France, I moved to the UK and got a master's in Motorsport Engineering from Cranfield University. This was a dream come true. My lecturers were F1 engineers, and on the weekends, I traveled across the country to work on race cars in club and professional racing. I became an aerodynamicist and worked in single-seaters for a while, and then my life pivoted. I was having trouble getting migratory authorization to stay in the UK and this was the middle of the big recession racing teams were taking a big hit, so a career in racing was getting complicated, and during a vacation trip to Colombia, I got a life-changing opportunity.

A family friend who was a physician and healthcare entrepreneur was in the process of acquiring an orthopedic device manufacturer and invited me to be a part of the due diligence process. I have been stuck in the bone device industry ever since, and now I am an entrepreneur and founder of TECHFIT Digital Surgery, a company where we actually use all of what I learned about simulation and additive manufacturing to provide better surgical outcomes for patients undergoing complicated reconstructions. More about TECHFIT here: www.techfit-ds.com

I have consistently side-hustled in racing throughout. I founded C2R Engineering, and we used the CNC machines we used to make implants and used them to CNC port cylinder heads, design and make pistons, con-rods, suspension bits, and anything you can think of. We used the 3D printers to make intake manifolds. We also had a little corner shop where we built engines; the most successful ones were the SR20VEs we built for one of our customers/benefactors, which pushed more than 205 whp. I also got to race, having a shot at the Bogota 6H, Colombia’s most important race, in a Nissan Sentra that we prepared and that used the SR20. I also raced in the Copa Nissan March, an arrive and drive championship where all cars were identically prepared Nissan Marches (Micra in some markets) (A tiny FWD car that was incredibly fun to drive).

In 2019, TECHFIT needed to grow beyond Colombia and I moved the company and my family to the US. Of all the places, we ended up in Daytona, no points for guessing what made us explore the area in the first place. The first five years of the company have been hard, which has limited my racing to a test in a Late Model car in New Smyrna Speedway (my first oval experience) and a lot of sim-racing. But being a Mopar lover and being in Daytona inspired me to buy a Challenger as my daily driver. It’s the V6 Challenger, and I love it. 

Last year, I took it on a lap of the Daytona road course as part of a charity event, and this July, I signed up for my first Autocross event in the Kart track at Daytona. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I am hooked I was not competitive at all, but I had a blast. I have already raced in my second event and am expecting to run my third next month. This means I will be moving out of the Novice class soon and to keep autocrossing, I will need to up my game and race people who do this regularly. I know the Challenger V6 is far from being the ideal car for Autocross but that sort of makes me want to do it even more. 

Also last year I added the project of raising a son to my already busy life which means I have to be very frugal with my spending and efficient with my time to be able to be competitive. Luckily Autocross is perfect for this.

In this blog, I intend to share the journey of how I intend to build myself and my car to race in the street class of the Central Florida Region SCCA Solo championship in 2025. I will share analyses of the modifications I will perform on the car and what I will do to try to understand it better and make it faster. I will also look at my driving with a critical eye and share some of my progress in that space as well in the hope that I can improve and be able to make the car competitive. I don’t have a specialized shop and intend to do everything out of my garage, which I need to clean up and share all of my experiments and techniques in this space. I hope you enjoy it and look forward to adding a bit to the content on Autocross available.