List of Suzuka Circuit fatalities
This article lists the fatal accidents that happened in the Suzuka Circuit, a motorsport race track that is operated by Mobilityland, a subsidiary of Honda Motor Co., Ltd., located in Suzuka City in the Mie Prefecture of Japan. Twelve have involved cars, including one involving the pace car, and seven have involved motorcycles. Seventeen people have died in accidents at the track during its half-century of existence, almost all of them Japanese professional racers, with the exceptions of American pace car driver Elmo Langley and French driver Jules Bianchi.
Deaths at the track have included that of Honda RC211V racer Daijiro Kato on 20 April 2003, after the Japanese motorcycle Grand Prix race. He died of a brain stem infarction after spending two weeks in a coma. Dome Karasu driver Tojiro Ukiya died in a test run on 20 August 1965, Lola T92/50 (with Mugen Honda engine) racer Hitoshi Ogawa on 24 May 1992, while on the way to the hospital immediately after the Japanese Formula 3000 race; and American, NASCAR pace car driver Elmo Langley died on 21 November 1996. Langley suffered a heart attack while driving the pace car.
The most recent fatal accident to have happened at the track is that of Jules Bianchi on 5 October 2014, who collided with a crane tractor that was deployed to pick up Adrian Sutil's car, which had spun out earlier. Bianchi succumbed to his injuries on 17 July 2015 following a nine-month coma, making him the first non-Japanese driver to die as a result of a crash on the track.