Tomyboy (Rocketbyz): I wanted to add some color to the grid

Only if you’ve been living under a rock you could have missed the two Rebellion Art cars. For this year’s 24 hours of Le Mans, Rebellion racing teamed up with Music producer and artist Tomyboy to create the unique LMP1 art cars. We sat down with the man behind arguably Le Mans’ most colorful creations.

I’ve been a music producer for many, many years. I’ve always felt very creative, so I did a lot more than produce music. My first real piece of art was a BMX bike I made for Chris Brown and he loved it so much that he used this bike on stage at one point. It was that moment that kicked it all off for me. I had tons of emails and missed calls about everyone that wanted to know about the BMX Bike. Since then I did so much, clothes, watches cars, you name it. I love to add a vibrant color to something make it stand out in the pack. Which is funny because I’m totally the opposite of that. I wear a mask when I do public appearances because I want my work to speak for itself not the person behind it.

How did you team up with Rebellion?

It all went pretty quickly. I had a car displayed at Baselworld, a top luxury watch event. Calim (Rebellion Group CEO) and I had a mutual friend Anish, he introduced Calim to my work. He loved it and a week or so later I was in Geneva talking about designing these race cars.

Unreal, I still don’t really believe it happened. I was amazed by the reaction. Everyone loved them. The drivers really loved them, which was important to me. There was so much attention and commotion for these designs, I was swept of my feet. Before this project I didn’t know anything about racing. I did know Le Mans because it’s the biggest race in the world. There I was on the grid, standing next to these fire breathing race cars with my personal art on them.

Did you tell the drivers not to crash your artworks?

(laughs) No, I didn’t, and they actually did damage one, but hey that’s racing. Luckily, we had two backup cars. The mechanics can easily change a body panel, which they had to do a few times.

We are still considering different options; they might even race them like this next season. For the next 24 hours of Le Mans we might develop a whole new design.

https://www.instagram.com/rocketbyz/