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Williams boss James Vowles has suggested rookies entering F1 now have a much tougher time than their counterparts even five years ago.
Logan Sargeant made his F1 debut with Williams in 2023 and will remain with the Grove outfit for a second year in 2024.
That comes after a difficult maiden championship, which saw him comprehensively out-performed by his more experienced team-mate Alex Albon.
Sargeant was only confirmed in the weeks following the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
The choice to delay the call on who would partner Albon was made in an attempt to give Sargeant time to prove his worth.
But conversely, with no other race seats available, it was a zero-risk decision on Vowles’ behalf; he could retain the American or take his pick from a litter of alternatives.
“In the old days – I don’t know how to describe old days, five years ago, six years ago – what we used to do is do about 30,000 kilometres of testing with a driver before you’d even consider putting them in the race car,” explained Vowles on the KTM Summer Grill.
“They need enough [time and experience] that they can explore the boundaries and limits of it because the step from any other motorsport series into this one is enormous.
“To put numbers on it, F2 and even IndyCar for that matter, would be about 14 seconds behind on a lap time, so you’re in a different ballpark to what you’re experiencing here.
“And it takes the drivers time to extract everything out of the tyres.
“Just focusing on the tyres for a second because that is the predominant item, you’re trying to get all four tyres within a few degrees of their optimum temperature – the window is only about four or five degrees.
“You’re trying to focus on that whilst trying to manhandle a car at 300 kilometres an hour on a circuit. It’s just a different world and it takes quite a while.”
That is the battle Sargeant faced in 2023, not made easier by a difficult FW45 that excelled at times but at others was found wanting.
The 23-year-old was frank in his assessment of himself mid-season, recognising that it was his inputs behind the wheel which were limiting his performance.
On a single lap, he was nip and tuck with Albon, but struggled to match the ex-Red Bull racer over a full grand prix distance.
“He started the year actually really strong,” Vowles noted.
“I think, and I said the same to him, might have been his undoing a little bit as well. He became perhaps overconfident that this is going to be okay.
“In Bahrain, he was qualifying with Lando [Norris], within the same millisecond, in Saudi he put in a laptime that was fastest than Alex, but deleted for track limits.
“Then you saw some other aspects of being a rookie,” he added.
“As soon as you take something [that] can destabilise your foundations, you question everything. Which is what happened in Saudi – lap deleted, which shouldn’t be a problem, we had plenty more laps to be able to get in, but that destabilised him.
“Then what you saw is, to get the same laptime out of the car, he was having to really overdrive the car quite a bit.
“By the way, that’s a very normal thing for a rookie to do, that’s not an insult, it’s just when you aren’t sure where the limit is, it’s easier to go slightly over it, and then you get really punished for it.
“That happened all the way up through the season until we started to get towards the end.
“Then, around Suzuka time, you would have seen a different Logan.”
In Japan, Sargeant had built up over the course of the weekend and looked on par with Albon, only to crash in qualifying – a comparatively small mistake in the final corner that was heavily punished by the old school nature of the circuit.
“But his performance there was back on pat with Alex for the car spec he had,” Vowles reasoned.
“And I’d say from there onwards, at the end of the season, you’ll see a driver that’s now building into it, not overdriving the vehicle, in control of what he’s doing.
“The point in Austin was because he didn’t throw things away just trying to do a Hail Mary to go one position up, he just kept it together on track, didn’t get track limits, did a solid job.
“Vegas qualifying, within the same tenth – in fact, from that point onwards, you’ll see his pace is there, but our car performance dropped off so significantly now that points just simply weren’t available to us.
“That’s my summary of Logan, but it also helps to understand why he’s absolutely deserving of a chance again,” he added.
“There’ll be a bit of a reset over the winter, there always is, but he’s matured significantly through the season.”
