Williams F1 Boss Says Why Team Dumped American Driver Logan Sargeant

• Williams F1 team has replaced diver Logan Sargeant mid-season with Formula 2 driver Franco Colapinto.

• Sargeant did not score a point across the 14 Grands Prix he contested.

• Sargeant was already set to leave Williams at the end of 2024, with confirmation last month that Carlos Sainz will take his place in 2025.

Williams F1 team principal James Vowles has defended the team’s decision to split from Logan Sargeant, outlining that the American had reached a ceiling in his potential.

Williams announced on Tuesday that it has benched Sargeant for the remainder of the 2024 campaign and will instead field rookie Franco Colapinto alongside Alex Albon.

Sargeant had struggled for pace through the campaign and did not score a point across the 14 Grands Prix he contested.

“No one wants to change a driver mid-season, it’s horrible, it is incredibly tough on the driver, it’s tough on the team, it is disruptive to say the least,” Vowles said during a media briefing Friday. “The cleanest point to have done it would have been at the beginning of the year. Logan, at the end of last year, was starting to get within a tenth of Alex and starting to be close, and it was good to see his progression.

“If that progression continued I think we would have seen a driver in a very strong place this year, and it [the end of 2023] didn’t feel like the right point to sever ties as a result of it.

“The reason now is straightforward: we’ve had enough experience under our belt to know he’s reached the limit of what he’s able to achieve—and in fact it’s almost unfair on him to furthermore continue with him.

“If you look at his face when he gets out of the car, he’s given you everything he possibly can, and it’s not enough. He absolutely never from a human perspective gave me anything other than 100 per cent of what he’s able to do, but the realization of where he is on his limits now is very clear.”

Sargeant was already set to leave Williams at the end of 2024, with confirmation last month that Carlos Sainz will take his place in 2025, and Vowles suggested that impending divorce accelerated the split.

“The relationship can only become more and more difficult across the last nine races towards the end of the year because he knows what his future holds, which is not to be in F1 anymore,” Vowles said.

“Actually a clean break at this stage feels like the correct decision for all parties, it feels like it’s fair to Logan. He won’t feel that way today, but I hope he reflects on it in the future that it is fair towards him in that regard.”

Vowles went on to clarify that while Sargeant destroying swathes of Williams’ new components in his sizeable practice accident at Zandvoort “was painful,” given the work undertaken to ready the new specification, the decision was not a direct outcome of the accident.

“And to be very clear to everyone it wasn’t just based on an accident, it was based on [the fact] in the race he had all of the parts that Alex had available to him, but the performance wasn’t there, he was lacking in that area, and the gap’s almost as big as it was last year,” Vowles said.

“If you react emotionally and react, you’re going to make some bad decisions. So one of the first things I did was not react to the crash. I isolated myself here, because the emotion involved in taking hundreds of hours of update kit and watching it burn is pretty painful.

“Accidents will happen. They’ll happen with Alex, they have happened with Alex. [It’s] not just [about] an accident, it has to be you’re earning your place here in the sport. With Logan, what I wanted to do was give what I thought was sufficient time for him to demonstrate where he is on tracks that I know we can perform at, and at the point where I said earlier in the year, earlier in the year there was a responsibility on us to build a fast enough car. We did not. From Zandvoort onwards, I believe we have built a car that is capable of points now, and that’s where the decision point changes.

“It comes hand in hand with performance of the car now being points-worthy. And in the case of it, it really did happen after the race on Sunday, and I dug through his data with enough detail to see where he was performance-wise and what’s happening. It wasn’t one area, there was a lack still of tire management, there was a lack of pace, and where he finished was just too far back.”