DEATH HAS ALWAYS BEEN—and will always be—a part of motor racing. Its first personal visit came at age 19 on my first day as a professional race-car mechanic; former America's Cup skipper Tom Blackaller pulled away from the pits, made it halfway through the lap, and died of a massive coronary after exiting Sears Point's carousel. My ignominious debut was followed by more surreal chapters—scrubbing pools of dried blood left behind by shattered bones in an Indy-car chassis and hearing engines fall silent while injured drivers are enveloped by safety workers.

When Justin Wilson died after being struck by debris at Pocono Raceway in August, the predictable hail of anguish and sorrow followed: Another friend buried, more questions of whether it could have been prevented. And there's something new to ponder.

Our sport works from a belief—often a little lie we tell ourselves—that something positive will come from each sacrifice. Fire-related deaths brought flame-resistant overalls. Broken wheels and chassis components that once rained from above after a crash were kept earthbound with safety tethers. Mounting numbers of basilar skull fractures inspired the HANS device. It's a coping mechanism that fills the time it takes to develop whatever crash-inspired safety innovations are required.

But Wilson, a 37-year-old husband and father of two, died for a reason that's all too familiar: He was strapped into an open-cockpit Indy car and got hit in the head. Before Wilson, it was F1 driver Jules Bianchi whose exposed helmet met a mobile crane. Two-time Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon crashed and was killed by a pole that caved in the side of his helmet. Wind the clock back to 1994, and it was Ayrton Senna dying in a crash where a piece of suspension pierced his brain.

Michael King/Getty Images

As with Wilson, Bianchi, and Wheldon, Senna's injuries were limited to the one portion of his body that was prone to direct contact. In a sport driven by pushing boundaries, the expected response to their head traumas would be to innovate and overcome, yet the ongoing need to protect drivers with some form of canopy or shield is willfully ignored. Untold millions are continually poured into developing the next performance gizmo, but two decades on from Senna's death, open-wheel sits idling.

"It's asinine to think with all the advancements we've made in this sport, we keep having drivers die from getting hit in the head," says F1 and Indy-car designer Gordon Kimball, whose son Charlie races for Chip Ganassi's IndyCar team. "Where's the sense of urgency to try and stop it from happening again?"

As legendary racing-car designer/driver Dan Gurney has found, death can be a costly form of inspiration.

"I'm not saying you have to have accidents to find better ways to do things, but I think you'll find that is what usually takes place. It's a case of looking for the solution after the fact."

The ongoing need to protect drivers with some form of canopy or shield is willfully ignored.

So if death is the prompt to act, why is open-wheel plagued by inaction on this issue? It's likely rooted in another lie. Thanks to all the safety improvements born from past tragedies, the frequency of deaths in F1 and IndyCar has been on a steady decline. Somewhere in those impressive statistics, the century-old need to keep pushing has been lost. Progress has stalled. However, newfound pressure from an unexpected source could finally force F1 and IndyCar to respond.

Bianchi's and Wilson's deaths inspired an outpouring of concern and support on social media for open-wheel driver safety and indicated that today's fan base is less willing to accept death as an occupational hazard.

"Can we kill a driver every couple of years this way?" Kimball asks. "I don't think so. If you look at the direction society is moving, people don't accept it the way they once did." If the cure for racing's safety malaise is eventually credited to Twitter and Facebook, so be it.

Former race engineer Marshall Pruett regularly ponders life—and death—in the paddock for R&T.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io