🇳🇱 F1'24: R15 - Fire in the Disco

The image of Logan Sargeant leaping away from a burning, wrecked Williams sums up his season.

At Zandvoort, the American Williams driver touched the wet grass as he exited Hugenholtzbocht in the final practice of the weekend, turning the banked glide into a slide and a slam, hitting the barriers at over 100mph and causing debris to fly everywhere and a fire at the back of his upgraded Williams FW46.

Sergeant was thankfully okay, leaping out of the car once he was told it was on fire, with the whole incident bringing out the red flags as the mechanics cancelled any dinner and sleep plans they might have had.

It was a crucial weekend for Williams, who had announced Carlos Sainz as Sargeant’s replacement after the Belgian Grand Prix and who arrived on the Dutch coast with upgrades to their car and ambitions to build on the four points that Alex Albon had got the team in 2024.

But it didn’t work out like that. Albon did brilliantly in qualifying, getting into Q3 and putting the car in eighth, before being disqualified for the session for a floor that was marginally too wide. 

With Kevin Magnussen’s Haas starting from the pits, it meant that Sargeant started 18th without even having to take part in qualifying. He’d started from there or lower eight times already this season. He recovered and raced, scoring zero points and finishing 16th.

For Albon, he finished 14th in the end, a wasted weekend that held some potential undone by fine margins in one case and a crash in the other.

It must have been incredibly frustrating to watch as a Williams fan. The team had some momentum, making a statement off the track with a 2025 (and beyond) driver line up of Albon and Sainz and had several new parts to add to the car.

Some of those - a new diffuser, sidepod inlet, engine cover, floor body and central air intake ended up strewn across the Dutch track as the statement they made wasn’t backed up by what happened on track. 

So with Albon’s future secure, what happens to the only American on the F1 grid? Sergeant perhaps wasn’t expected to do much in F1, finishing fourth in his first and only full F2 season. And backmarker teams have been known to put ability lower down the priority list than the finance and marketing opportunities a driver might bring to a team.

This isn’t new, but Sargeant is not a pay driver. He’s a product of the Williams Driver Academy and Principal James Vowles says that they “invested” in his junior career. 

But now in the second half of his second and surely final season in F1, it’s difficult to see that pace and potential that he showed in F2 translate over to the elite level. It also leaves us with another question. What will Sargeant’s next move be?

As an American, the most obvious series would be IndyCar. Ex-F1 drivers Romain Grosjean and Marcus Ericsson made the move from being at the back of the F1 grid to the series, which is growing in stature, and there is no guarantee that F1 experience would - as Grosjean and Ericsson have seen - put him automatically in contention for wins in America.

But there doesn’t seem to be many exit routes for Sargeant. He has a handful of endurance races under his belt, but the vast majority of his experience comes from single-seater open-wheel racing. If he doesn’t move to Indy, he could become a valuable well of experience as a third driver somewhere, although again, with the other drivers in Williams’ academy, it may not work.

And some of those drivers are well worth keeping your eye on. Zak O’Sullivan and Franco Colapinto have each won at least one race in this year’s Formula 2 championship, while Luke Browning is in contention for the Formula 3 title in a stacked field full of future F1 drivers.

The signing of Sainz probably closes the door off to these drivers for a couple of years, But there might still be a twist to come.

These rumours are not massively well-sourced but Red Bull Junior Liam Lawson is being touted a potential in-season replacement for Sargeant. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but replacing a driver in a Mercedes-powered car with a Red Bull Junior is an audacious call to say the least. Lawson raced in Monza last season, finishing 11th, and if you’re going to put a new driver in, Monza would be one of the places to do it (see also de Vries, Nyck), but the sport’s politics and data make it unlikely to me.

The more logical replacement would be Kimi Antonelli. The young Italian Prema driver has not had the most sparkling of F2 seasons. He is currently seventh in the standings and is being strongly linked with Mercedes next season. Antonelli, who turned 18 on the day of the Dutch Grand Prix, could be given a few flyaway races to get used to F1 and the Mercedes powertrain. But I don’t see this happening either. It would either be a full season or nothing. What happens if he gets in this car that has four points all season and has his confidence shattered before making the step up to big school?  No, I think Sargeant finishes the season with Williams, but it looks like the team is taking less interest in the American as they look ahead to 2025 and beyond.

And one more note about Williams. That parade of pay drivers I mentioned earlier. Not all of them are objectively bad. But they fulfilled a need for finance before anything else. In 2021, team CEO Jost Capito said that Williams are no longer dependent on pay drivers. George Russell went to Mercedes and Alex Albon came in alongside Nicolas Latifi. But now in 2024, it looks like those words are true. All drivers bring some sort of finance, but in Albon and Sainz, they have two drivers who know how to finish in the points and start the slog up the midfield for the team that dominated the series for so many years.

With a hefty repair bill and marginal errors wrecking a race weekend, it would be easy to dismiss this as another false dawn for Williams, but they will be a team to watch for the right reasons as 2024 draws to a close.

Formula 1 is back for a bit before another month away from the track in September-October. We’ve got the high-speed Monza track and then the technical Singapore night race before then. There might be a battle for the Drivers’ Championship, but it’s the Team battle that is really getting close. Red Bull-McLaren is going to be a lot of fun for fans.