Alex Albon will sit out Free Practice 2 at the Formula 1 Sao Paulo Grand Prix as Logan Sargeant completes another outing for the team.

Sargeant will join Albon at Williams next season should he secure the requisite number of points to gain a Super Licence.

He is currently 12 points short of the 40 he needs to do that.

By taking part in Free Practice 2, provided he completes an incident-free 100 km of running, he will add a single point to his tally.

He will look to do likewise at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix next week.

The American also needs to finish no lower than seventh in the Formula 2 Championship to secure the balance of the points needed.

“For sure it will have a small effect,” Albon noted of the fact he’ll sit out Free Practice 2 this weekend.

“It’s better to lose FP2 here than FP1, just the way that Qualifying is obviously on the Friday.

“Generally speaking it should be fine.

“The main concern is obviously if it’s wet on Saturday and it’s dry on Friday, then might be a bit of learning to do in [the] Sprint race.”

As a Sprint weekend, cars enter parc ferme the moment they roll out of the garage in Qualifying.

Free Practice 2, therefore, offers comparatively little value as teams cannot change the car set up, the bulk of time instead turned to learning about the tyres ahead of the Sprint and, beyond that, the race.

Albon was 12th fastest in Free Practice 1 on Friday in a promising result, building on an encouraging performance in Mexico last time out.

“I feel like we came out of the weekend thinking, well, let’s say we did a better job than we expected,” he said of the Mexico City Grand Prix weekend.

“It’s kind of how it goes. I think you’d never really know, even with these cars still, two races to go, where are you going to be in terms of the ladder of performance?

“I’ll go into this weekend the same as always.

“I actually getting more confused every time, every race weekend where we are, but I think we can go into this with some optimism.”