Thomas Cole’s X bio has one line that most players would never have: “2nd only to Carl Jr.” Four World final runner-up finishes and two World Cup titles. A career that by any measure sits at the very top of Trackmania’s history. And still: second. He put it there himself.

Before any of that, he was training to be a Chartered Accountant, had the career and then Trackmania got serious enough that the choice made itself. Now, three days into going full-time as a professional player, he won DreamHack Birmingham on home soil in front of a crowd. With EWC in Paris two months away, we sat down with Pac to find out what all of it actually feels like from the inside.

The accountant question is one most people gloss over. Trackmania at the top level is hundreds (sometimes thousandths) of a second, tiny input adjustments, discovering best possible lines. Whether someone who spent years reading numbers professionally approaches that differently to someone who just fell into the game and never stopped is not obvious.

Reps and pattern recognition win in Trackmania, not spreadsheets. Where the accounting background shows up is more specific: he can tell quickly whether a tenth is actually on the table or whether he’s been chasing a dead line for the last hour. Six hours into a map, that read is worth more than any system.

Then there is the bio line. “2nd only to Carl Jr” sits above every interview, every tournament result, every highlight clip and every posted X reply. Confident self-awareness or a motivational prompt written in public. Probably both.

It is not resignation. The standard he holds himself to is simple: if you are going to lose, lose to the best. Four world-level final runner-up finishes either means he has made peace with it, or it means he has not. Probably the second one.

The 2025 Trackmania World Cup ran in a 2v2 format. Pac and CarlJr played as Solary, beat Mudda and Bren 4-0 in the Grand Final, and took the title. Not the first time they had been on the same side of a result, but the cleanest. Three months later CarlJr had signed for Falcons, Pac for Vitality, and that was that.

A decade of racing each other for the same titles means an org split barely registers. What is different this time is what Falcons built around CarlJr: they signed Spammiej, the 2012 Nations Forever World Champion, as his dedicated coach in February. No player at that level in competitive Trackmania has had a former world champion in their corner before..

Short answer. Consistent with the bio line: he is not walking into Paris thinking about who is in CarlJr’s corner. He is thinking about his own run.

Team Vitality entered Trackmania in February 2026 with one signing. Their Trackmania setup is new, but the org runs rosters in Counter-Strike, VALORANT, League of Legends, and a dozen other titles. The CS team had been winning most of what it entered. For a game that has spent most of its competitive life in smaller community structures, it is a different kind of environment to land in.

The CS team’s results create internal pressure, not external. Not the org telling him what to deliver, but pressure he has put on himself by landing in a winning environment and not wanting to be the exception. Most players in this scene have never had that kind of reference point sitting next to them.

Five weeks after the Vitality announcement, DreamHack Birmingham ran at the NEC. Home country. Live crowd. The biggest domestic Trackmania event the UK has hosted. Pac won. He qualified for EWC. And there was no physical trophy to show for it, which has now happened twice in a row.

Three days full-time. That detail reframes the DHB win entirely. The tournament most players would point to as one of the hardest fields ever assembled, won by someone who had technically been a full-time professional for 72 hours. The trophy question is legitimate, the community has noticed it, and Pac clearly has too. Whether the organisers have is a different matter.

EWC runs August 19-22 in Paris. Thirty-two players, $500,000 prize pool. Pac is qualified. CarlJr is qualified. Most of the players Pac has spent his career racing against are qualified. In almost every sense, the event the last decade of competitive Trackmania has been building toward.

Same answer as always: the result matters more than what surrounds it. The org, the prize pool, the stage, the crowd. Context. The run is still the run. What changes at EWC is not the inputs, it is what those inputs add up to when the leaderboard settles. A trophy. An accolade. What the bio line has been pointing at.

The bio still reads “2nd only to Carl Jr.” It will probably still read that going into Paris. What happens in August is either the moment it changes, or the moment it becomes the most honest thing written about a Trackmania career. Either way, he put it there on purpose.