David Loring (1950-2012)

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.