As accustomed as we may become to losing our racing compatriots, there remain times when a death still comes as a shock, and one of those was the news that David Loring had died in mid-September at the age of 62. Although he had endured and survived previous internal ailments, in the end he succumbed to the combination of liver and kidney failure.
I first met David in the spring of 1980, just after I’d joined RACECAR magazine as its managing editor. He was helping Ken Dieter run Crossle Pacific, the West Coast distributor for Crossle formula cars, and it seemed almost as if we’d been friends all our lives, even though neither of us really knew all that much about the other.
By then, the ascendant phase of David’s racing career was behind him, a time when he had dominated Formula Ford racing in Canada and the eastern U.S. with his Caldwell D9, and had ridden that success to England in pursuit of his dream of racing in Formula One like his personal heroes, Jim Clark and Ronnie Peterson. It was there he met and raced against our own Ed McDonough while winning five British FF races in 1972 and earning 5th in the hotly contested series championship. Although he was named Most Talented Foreign Driver, he would return home in disappointment at year’s end after being taken out of the all-important Formula Ford Festival final by a collision with an inattentive competitor.
Upon returning to the USA, David hooked up with famed engine builder Charlie Williams in Kansas City, for whom he raced Merlyns in FF and Atlantic, and in 1974 he was called in to substitute for Gilles Villeneuve in the Ecurie Canada March 74B after the French-Canadian broke his leg in a crash at Mosport. In his three Atlantic starts before Villeneuve returned he took one pole position and posted a 2nd-place finish.
Then came the invitation from Dan Gurney to join AAR’s Eagle Formula Ford project, and in 1978 he drove that John Ward-designed car to victory in the SCCA’s National Championship Runoffs at Road Atlanta. When Gurney closed down the Eagle FF program, David went to work for John Paul, helping son John Jr. learn the craft during his own formative years, but eventually the deal turned sour.
Deciding he’d finally had enough of racing, David set out for Alaska to live life in the wilderness. He called a ranch on Kodiak Island home for several years, but ultimatey returned south to build a Mazda-powered Camel Lights prototype for Pierre Honneger that he dubbed Denali in tribute to his Alaskan adventure. Driving that car with Honneger, Loring revived his career in IMSA, where he scored another dozen wins in Lights, GTU and GTO over the next few seasons—including winning the GTU championship for Bob Leitzinger’s Nissan team in 1992. Still, he remained one of the foremost members of the group of young American drivers who never managed to realize their full potential. In his case it was probably because he never gave much thought to self-promotion as it was just not his way of doing things.
For many of those years David was also a valued instructor with the Skip Barber Racing School, and when he finally retired from driving he set up his own racing and restoration shop, David Loring Racing, near his home in New Hampshire. I last saw him at Laguna Seca in 2010 when he came out for the Dan Gurney Tribute, and as always was looking forward to seeing him again.
To his wife Kathy, sons Evan and Alyks, brothers Andrew, Steven, Charles Jr. and Eric, as well as sister Katy, Vintage Racecar offers its most sincere condolences.
— John Zimmermann
