Death on the Racetrack: The Grand Prix of Sonoma After Justin Wilson

Sunday was not exactly a day of mourning at Sonoma Raceway.

Driver Marco Andretti said as much in an interview with Fox Sports following a procession across the Golden Gate Bridge in honor of Justin Wilson, the British 37-year-old who died after being struck by debris at Pocono Raceway on August 23. Andretti drove Wilson's No. 25 across the bridge.

"It's hard to ever move on from something like that," he said. "It won't fully hit me until after the season is over and we drop our focus."

The tributes to Wilson and the technicolor showmanship of the Verizon IndyCar Series made for a strange mix at Sunday's race, IndyCar's 2015 season finale. There was the usual carnival fare (hot dogs on sticks, staffers in bright Hawaiian shirts blending smoothies, tacos that were sworn to be Really Good and Authentic and were at least surprisingly alright) as well as Sonoma's particular innovations (plastic grape leaves everywhere, full pint glasses of what looked like pink champagne at every turn). There were Justin Wilson T-shirts — #BADASSWILSON — on crewmembers as well as fans, to benefit the daughters he left behind. There were parachutists dropping in from the sky; planes diving at the track and streaking red, white, and blue smoke through the air; children in oversize noise blockers, faces painted turquoise from snow cones. A Union Jack at half-mast.

A long moment of silence was called before the race began and suddenly the carnival cut out, the only sound the hum of generators in the pit and the flapping of checkered flag bunting in the wind.

When public horrors like this happen now, they live on online. On Twitter, on Vine. A death in GIFs, looping endlessly, always ending the same way, always beginning again. Sage Karam spinning out on Turn 1. A blast of parts flying into the air as Karam's car hits the wall. One, two, three, ten cars clearing the falling debris. Justin Wilson, No. 25, rounding Turn 1. Karam's nosecone falling to the asphalt, bouncing back into the air, reaching the top of its arc. Beginning to make its way back down.

And then the shudder of an impact at 220 miles per hour, and Wilson's car careening toward the inside wall, a blue and silver bird shot from the air. No. 25 coming to a rest, and nobody getting out. Knocked out, they say, instantly, already slipping into the coma from which he would not awake.

Sage Karam was at Sonoma Raceway on Sunday, but he didn't drive. He wasn't scheduled to, even before the accident: his driving partner and Chip Ganassi Racing teammate, Sebastian Saavedra, raced the No. 8 Chevrolet instead, fighting for the lead for much of the first half but slipping to a forgettable 13th place finish.

Just a day before the crash, the New York Times hailed the 20-year-old Karam as "the new face of IndyCar." Indeed, he might be; however promising his career is, though, he entered Pocono with just 12 races under his belt.

Now he must reckon with what happened there, and he will hear and maybe believe a lot of truths: that it was a freak thing, that there was nothing anyone could do, that it was precisely the wrong part at precisely the wrong time at precisely the wrong angle, the exposed one.

IndyCar must reckon with these things, too.

That auto racing is a dangerous sport is a given: man's ability to make cars go very fast has long outpaced his ability to protect the human bodies inside them. Or, rather, it has outpaced his willingness to do so.

In IndyCar and its closed-cockpit sibling, NASCAR, safety reforms have often followed tragedy. The fiery wreck at the 1964 Indianapolis 500 that claimed Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald led to new fuel regulations; Dale Earnhardt's death in 2001 made head restraints mandatory.

Talk now has turned to finding some way, any way, to protect open wheel drivers.

The Emmons siblings — Linda, Marian, Marsha, and Pete — have been attending IndyCar races since 1990; they've been to the Indy 500 three times. Since the Grand Prix of Sonoma (now the GoPro Grand Prix) began in 2005, the Emmonses haven't missed a year. Pete lives in the Bay Area and his sisters fly in for the occasion: Linda and Marsha from Wyoming and Marian from Arizona. On Sunday, they were at Sonoma Raceway for the finale. It was an unusually close one.

IndyCar drivers accumulate points throughout the 17-race season, for victories as well as leading individual laps, and as the season neared its end, a significant portion of the field was within reach of the championship. The stakes were that much higher on Sunday because Sonoma, like its Indianapolis counterpart, offers double points. Ultimately, it was Pete Emmons's pick, Scott Dixon of Chip Ganassi Racing, who prevailed, tying Juan Pablo Montoya in points and winning on a tiebreaker in the final lap. His sisters, who rooted for Helio Castroneves (15th for the day), 2004 champion Tony Kanaan (fourth), and 2012 champ Ryan Hunter-Reay (second), sighed.

Asked if they were apprehensive given what happened the week before at Pocono, the Emmons siblings shrugged.

"I just got caught up in everything," said Marsha Emmons. "Didn't bother me. I got caught up in the racing today."

"It was exciting," offered one of her sisters.

"It was exciting," Marsha agreed.

Yet tragedy at the racetrack is all too familiar for the Emmonses.

Linda Emmons had a special connection with Dan Wheldon, a popular driver from the UK. She knows it sounds silly, but she did. She was a fan, but it was more than that: when she'd wait in line to get his autograph, which she did whenever she could get to one of his races, he'd recognize her. He knew who she was.

Linda and her siblings were at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on October 16, 2011. That day, Wheldon was competing for a $5 million prize to split with a fan. Then, in the 11th lap, a 15-car wreck sent Wheldon's vehicle flying more than 300 feet down the track. His head struck a pole. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He was 33.

At the mention of Wheldon, Linda's eyes fill with tears.

"We've seen death on the racetrack," her sister Marian explains. "It's tragic. When you lose a racing driver, it's like you've lost part of your family."

The Emmonses nod. When they talk about Dan Wheldon, they use the present tense.

This is the word you hear in racing again and again: family. It's a sport that lends itself easily to the comparison, in part because of the grueling race circuit and the network of teams and sponsors, and because drivers often race into their 40s and beyond. It's also a sport dominated by dynastic, multigenerational families — the genetic kind — like the Andretti clan.

After the race, the pit lane reopened and fans flooded the track. Newly crowned champion Scott Dixon and team owner Chip Ganassi crowd-surfed into the audience, a jubilant Ganassi, himself a former driver, laughing and high-fiving wildly as he was gently lowered, eventually, to his feet by fans. The crowd roared its approval, basking in the sort of contact that rarely happens in other sports.

Dixon was a close friend of Justin Wilson's, and stayed behind with his family in Pennsylvania last week as Wilson remained in a coma. This was not his first brush with on-track tragedy and its aftermath: after Dan Wheldon's death, Dixon moved his family to Florida for several months to support Wheldon's wife and young sons.

"We all raced with heavy hearts this weekend," Dixon said. "It's been a very tough week. It's such a small community. But Justin would have wanted us to go out and race, and today I gave it my all from when the green flag dropped. Much love to the Wilson family."

As he stood on the stage and gave thanks, a fan stooped to pick up a piece of tire from the track, holding it up in wonder.

Justin Wilson will be buried this week in his native Sheffield, England.