The TOCA series began as a licensed game for the British Touring Car Championship, but by the third Race Driver entry it had expanded far beyond that origin into a broad multi-discipline simulation. Notably, despite carrying the TOCA name, Race Driver 3 does not include the British Touring Car Championship. Instead it leads with the DTM and V8 Supercars championships as its headline licensed properties. The game was unveiled on May 26, 2005 under the working title TOCA Race Driver 2006 before receiving its final name.
Race Driver 3 offers 120 championships spanning 35 types of racing, organised across three main modes: World Tour, Pro Career, and Free Race. Additional bonus championships across various disciplines supplement the main structure. The breadth of motorsport covered is substantial, encompassing open-wheel racing, GT competition, oval racing, rallying, and off-road events.
Licensed championships in the game include DTM, the V8 Supercars championship, IRL IndyCar racing, and British GT. The Formula Williams FW27 is the featured car for the Formula 1 series within the game. A Vintage series provides access to historic machinery alongside the contemporary competitions. A career mode is complemented by an open-ended World Tour that unlocks tracks by achieving performance targets within Pro Career events.
Settings for races are highly configurable. Players control the number of laps, difficulty level, and race rules covering cut-corner penalties, wrong-way penalties, and careless driving flags. Optional qualifying sessions let the player secure grid positions rather than starting at the back. Race commentary from a crew chief character advances through the career with cutscenes and driving advice.
Online multiplayer supports up to 12 players on PlayStation 2 and PC and 8 players on Xbox. PC online play used GameSpy servers until that service closed in 2014; a subsequent workaround via the Tunngle network operated until April 2018.
Codemasters interviewed real racing drivers to inform the AI behaviour in Race Driver 3, aiming to model the moment-to-moment challenge of defending and overtaking rather than the runaway-leader patterns common in competing titles. Designer Johnathan Davis articulated the goal as ensuring competitive battles sustained throughout a race rather than resolving at the first corner. The damage model inherited from TOCA Race Driver 2 was extended to cover engine, suspension, axle, and steering systems independently. Tyre behaviour was also overhauled, incorporating temperature effects and progressive wear over race distance.
A single-player demo was released in December 2005. The main release followed in February 2006 for Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. A standalone PSP version titled TOCA Race Driver 3 Challenge released in February 2007. A Mac OS X port arrived in October 2008. The game was part of the original GOG.com catalogue.
Race Driver 3 received generally favourable reviews across platforms. Metacritic scores ranged from 76 out of 100 for the PSP version to 84 out of 100 for the Windows and Xbox versions. Famitsu awarded the PlayStation 2 version 28 out of 40. Critics frequently drew comparisons to Gran Turismo 4 and Forza Motorsport in recognition of the game's depth, particularly praising its multi-discipline scope, collision modelling, and vehicle damage systems. The game reached second place in the UK sales chart in February 2006, its release month, and sixth place the following month.
TOCA Race Driver 3 marked the effective endpoint of Codemasters' long-running TOCA franchise. The studio's subsequent Race Driver series dropped the TOCA prefix, and Race Driver: Grid in 2008 completed the transition into a renamed franchise with a broader global identity. The multi-championship breadth that Race Driver 3 pioneered—covering DTM, IndyCar, V8 Supercars, rally, and GT in a single game—was not replicated in the same form in the Grid series, which focused on a unified fictional career structure rather than discrete licensed championships.