Exclusive: Seb Murray opens up on Mid-Ohio Indy NXT concussion
- Archie O’Reilly
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Sebastian Murray knew the impact was a sizable one. The smoking, mangled mess of a car from which he emerged and glanced back towards confirmed that.
But not until he first viewed a replay of the accident did he quite gauge what a terrifying ordeal he had been through. And the toils of the coming weeks then only verified the severity of what the 18-year-old had endured in that little-over-five-second period.
It was the eighth round of Murray’s rookie season in Indy NXT, the setting the 2.258-mile Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Piloting Andretti Cape’s No.2 machine, the Scotsman was bidding to make his way forward from a starting position of 11th place.
Come the fourth tour of the 35-lap premier IndyCar support race, bogged down in 12th, Murray was working on passing Chip Ganassi Racing’s Bryce Aron to regain his lost position. He had attempted to make an outside pass in Turn 4 but ran slightly wide onto the exit kerb, gathering the sliding car to get a run on Aron into the high-speed Kink.
Everything seemed in line. But from behind, Murray’s teammate Ricardo Escotto had a run of his own. And entering the Kink, a slight trajectory to the right saw Escotto’s right-front corner make contact with Murray’s left-rear tyre. The consequences were drastic.
It may well have been inconsequential in another, slower-speed corner. But it was far from that on one of the fastest corners on the NXT schedule. A dramatic scene ensued.
Murray was hooked into the left-side Armco barrier - hardly a cushioned strike against the metal surface. And within seconds, through a cloud of dust and shower of splintering carbon fibre, Murray’s car - without a front or rear wing and with all four corners destroyed - came to a bouncing, aggressively-rotating halt in a field of debris.
“I didn’t realise how big it was until I watched it back but obviously realised how big the impact was and everything,” Murray recalls, speaking nearly four months on. “The immediate thought was letting my engineer know that I was okay, letting everybody else know that I was okay - all my family at home, who were watching.
“So that’s why I got out the car as quick as I did. And then I went over to Ricardo and asked if he was fine and he said he was fine. So that was all the important stuff done.”
With the red flag thrown, only upon the showing of the replays, once Murray and Escotto had emerged from their totalled race cars, did it transpire just how petrifying an incident it had been - particularly for Murray.
After finding himself jammed into the barriers by Escotto’s car, Murray’s backwards-facing machine almost immediately lifted vertically off the ground. It only ever-so-marginally avoided the directly-above flag stand before completing an entire backflip.
As the car landed, digging up a bulk of dirt from trackside, it bounced off its front-left corner and spun a full 360 degrees while still sideways and airborne, rotating twice more as it came to rest on the littered tarmac.
It was credit to the advancements in safety that both drivers were able to quickly exit their stricken vehicles, with Murray keen to check up on his teammate, putting aside any thought of a blame game in the wake of such a seismic shunt. A visibly angered Escotto, on the other hand, had some more choice words in his interview with FOX Sports.
“It took me a lot to be contained and just try to calm me down,” he said at the time. “We shouldn’t be racing like that. He moved and obviously that makes contact. I’m happy I didn’t see him as much because it was hard to control myself.”
Murray was more measured in his views and his gratitude that everyone was able to walk away unharmed. It was certainly a relief in the immediate aftermath that both drivers were in a position to be promptly released from the at-track medical centre and speak to television.
There were no injuries, so to speak, which was one concern alleviated. But as with every accident of that magnitude, monitoring was required in case of a concussion.
“I actually got cleared by medical the Monday after the crash,” Murray remembers. “But I think I was so filled with adrenaline, we did all the tests we needed to do and they were actually better than my baseline. So they were like: ‘Yeah, you’re fine. You’re good to go.’
“I knew something wasn’t right.”
Mid-Ohio fell within the hectic mid-portion of the season. It was straight to the heady speeds of the 0.894-mile short oval of Iowa Speedway within a matter of days. A quick turnaround.
Having been cleared by the series, Murray was in a position where he would be able to race. But in the days following his Sunday crash, Murray did not feel himself, taking matters into his own hands with the view that you can never be careful enough in these situations.
The goal was still to race at Iowa but precautions had to be taken.
“I spent the whole week basically acting like I had a concussion; no screen time, no really hard training or anything like that, just keeping it steady,” he admits. “[I was] doing anything I could, really, to get back in the car for Iowa because that was one of the ovals where we were pretty strong in pre-season…
“… but there was just no way.”
Murray still went to Iowa with his racing gear in hand in the expectation that he would race. Though maybe it was more out of hope than genuine belief.
He had arranged to meet with the medical team again in advance of the weekend, realising that with the adrenaline having worn off, it would be sensible to reevaluate his condition, especially given some of the concerns that had emerged across the week.
“They obviously watched the crash and were like: ‘You should have something wrong,’” Murray says. “So we had arranged to do all the tests again and we did them all and they were just off the charts. It was so bad.
“I kept asking them: ‘Can we do one more test? One more test. And if that’s good, maybe…’ But they were like: ‘No.’ Flat ‘no’. We did a couple more tests and the results were really bad. So it was a no-go for me for that race. I was just furious because I was injured.”
Murray was thrust into an unusual situation for the Iowa weekend - at the track, watching the series in which he races. But given how he continued to feel across that weekend, it was unquestionably for the better that he was not ultimately cleared to participate.
“Honestly, I hate it. It’s the worst thing a driver can do is spectate the race they should be in,” he asserts. “But honestly, it was good looking back at it, because on the Saturday, Sunday, my head was so, so sore. I had really, really bad symptoms from that week on.
“What they said is that the concussion normally takes a few days to actually kick in - and it got really bad over the course of that weekend. Especially being such a fast short oval as well, it was obviously good that I didn’t drive, because if I was to crash, it would have been obviously worse. You’ve got to be so careful with your head.”
Mercifully, given there is no rushing the process, there was a fortnight between Iowa and Laguna Seca for Murray to recover and for symptoms to dissipate. He was desperate not to miss another event, particularly given the Laguna weekend was a doubleheader thus with double the points on offer.
There was never anything other than a wholehearted desire to get back behind the wheel, regardless of the enormity of the crash he had suffered.
“My main focus was just to get back in the car as soon as possible,” he affirms. “I didn’t have any weird feeling about the crash or have any bad blood about it. For me, it was just head down and recover as soon as possible and try to get back in the car as soon as we can.
“It was a pretty bad concussion. I didn’t really know when I was going to be able to get back in the car, whether it be Laguna or Portland. If I missed three races, it would have been a massive hit on the championship and I would have missed out on a lot of learning as well.
“So for me after that, I just kept my head down, was fully focused on keeping training as much as I could. But I couldn’t train too hard with the concussion but [was] just doing loads of prep and trying to heal as quickly as I could.”
As it was, Murray’s two weeks of recovery went smoothly and he was cleared to return to racing at Laguna Seca. And it was a promising weekend, with two eighth-place starts and season-best result of fifth in Race 2 after a gearbox failure in Saturday’s race.
Murray was able to put the accident of three weeks prior promptly in the past, albeit with some weariness creeping in towards the back end of the weekend’s running.
“I go back in and just go on with it straight away like it never happened, really,” he explains. “But towards the end of the races, my head would start to get a little bit sore.
“I was completely fine physical wise and no issues there, but my head would just get a bit sore towards the end of the races. Obviously Laguna is a pretty physical track as well; your body goes through a lot there so that didn’t help.
“Besides that, I was fine, honestly. But just towards the end of the races, I felt like I was overheating or something and then just a little sore head. So keeping hydrated and all that, filled with electrolytes and everything, it was really crucial before the race.”
With a race’s absence to account for, Murray rounded out the season 13th in the standings. And with the events of Mid-Ohio and the tough weeks which followed firmly behind him, he now embarks on a new chapter within the four-car Andretti Global operation for his sophomore season in Indy NXT in 2026.
