Yahoo Autos Car and Driver Writer, Editor, and Racer Tony Swan Has Died at Age 78
Tony Swan, former Car and Driver executive editor, a contributor to CarandDriver.com, and my longtime friend, passed away on September 27, 2018, after many years living with cancer. He was 78 years old.
Tony was smart, well read, funny, irascible, cantankerous, opinionated, friendly, difficult, charming, honest, and eminently interesting to be around.
He loved cars, car people, and words. (It was not beyond him to correct poor word choice or grammar in one of our emails.) But most of all, he loved racing.
Former Car and Driver editor-in-chief Csaba Csere remembers: "We always had writers who wanted to race cars at Car and Driver, but nobody had the burning desire to get behind the wheel more strongly than Tony. I met him at the Nelson Ledges 24-hour race in the early '80s, and we co-drove a 24 Hours of LeMons race together just this past June. In between, Tony spent more of his time and money on race cars than any other journalist I know." Tony's email signature line was "Old Boy Racer."
"I'm your racing pimp, R.C.," Tony would say to me with a laugh because of the many times he had put together a racing deal and then asked me along for the ride-literally and figuratively. And not just me; he had a network of racing buddies who also benefited from his ceaseless and highly effective scheming. Going racing was Tony's equivalent of a golfing or fishing weekend, and he enjoyed the camaraderie of those weekends as much as the track time. All of us did.
Through the years, Tony held both amateur and professional racing licenses. He competed in hundreds of races, including about three dozen 24-hour events, in everything from factory-backed Corvette showroom-stock cars to a Saleen Mustang painted in the black-and-white colors of the California Highway Patrol. He won plenty of them.
Racing was Tony's avocation, but automotive journalism was his career and lifelong pursuit. He got his start covering sports for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, then wrote for AutoWeek, Better Homes and Gardens, and Cycle World magazine before making the jump to Motor Trend, where he eventually became editor-in-chief. He did a stint as the automotive editor for Popular Mechanics magazine before Csere brought him on staff as senior editor of Car and Driver in 1998. He rose to executive editor in 2000, a role he held through 2006.
In the course of his career, Tony also served as auto critic for the Detroit Free Press and contributed to many websites and print publications, including the New York Times. He was a founding member of the North American Car of the Year jury. He won the 2004 Ken Purdy award, automotive journalism's highest honor, for "The 24 Hours of Dudenhofen," a story he wrote while executive editor of Car and Driver. Several years ago he put together his own blog, Swan Drives, so he could write even more about cars and life. He kept writing for C/D right up to his final days.
During the 2018 racing season, Tony had been competing in the LeMons series in a pristine BMW 330i coupe built by his good friend, pro racer T.C. Kline. Although T.C. never said as much, we suspect that he built the car expressly to give Tony a great ride in this, his final year of competition. It was Tony's stated intention to finish his racing career at the October 2018 LeMons race, and he was, characteristically, righteously angry that his health prevented that last competitive hurrah.
That was Tony through and through. The word that best describes him is "tough." He gave no quarter to his illness. He put himself through multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and experimental treatments for years without so much as a complaint. He kept up a hectic travel and work schedule, refusing to let his illness slow him down, in life or on the track.
At this past July's LeMons race, which was run in 95-degree heat, he refused an offer to use my cool shirt-which circulates chilled water around the torso to keep you from overheating-with a brusque "no." He then went out and defiantly drove hour-and-a-half stints on both Saturday and Sunday-and had to be helped from the car. And still he was fast.
Before strapping in, he texted a photo of himself in his race suit, middle finger prominently raised, to his doctor, who had advised him not to race. It was that same attitude that allowed him to carry on years longer than the medical experts had told him would be possible.
Alas, despite a will of iron and the stubbornness of a pack mule, Tony could not ultimately outrace the inevitable. He is survived by his loving wife and partner, Mary Seelhorst; his son, Austin, and daughter, Hillary; six grandchildren; and a large group of friends who will forever miss his irascibly lovable self.
Writer. Colleague. Racing buddy. Friend. Antonio, so long and Godspeed. You'll always be a winner.
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