On August 23, 2015, the IndyCar Series race at Pocono Raceway was producing a spectacular but increasingly dangerous contest, with 33 lead changes and a record 12 caution periods. With 21 laps remaining, rookie Sage Karam was leading when he lost control of his Chevrolet entering Turn 1, struck the outside wall, and destroyed much of the front of the car. The detached nose cone was launched back onto the racing surface, bouncing through the field. Justin Wilson, a highly respected 37-year-old English driver running near the rear of the lead-lap cars, had almost no opportunity to react. The nose cone struck him directly on the helmet with enormous force, rendering him unconscious. His No. 25 Honda then veered across the track and hit the inside wall. Karam escaped with only minor physical injuries, but Wilson had to be extricated from his car and was airlifted to Lehigh Valley Hospital–Cedar Crest in Allentown with a severe head injury and coma-level condition.
Wilson remained in critical condition overnight, and at approximately 9:00 p.m. local time on August 24, Indianapolis Motor Speedway officials announced that he had died. He became the first IndyCar driver killed since Dan Wheldon’s death at Las Vegas in 2011 and the second major open-wheel driver to die from a crash-related head injury in 2015, after Formula 1 driver Jules Bianchi. Wilson’s death exposed the lethal vulnerability of open-cockpit racing to detached aerodynamic parts, even when the initial crash itself was survivable. Beginning in 2016, IndyCar required nose cones and rear wings to be tethered to cars on superspeedways. The accident also became an important factor in the series’ eventual adoption of the aeroscreen cockpit-protection system in 2019.
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