Does Williams’ call to drop Sargeant for Colapinto make sense?

Following months of giving Logan Sargeant the benefit of the doubt, a costly crash in Zandvoort has finally prompted the Williams Formula 1 team to replace him with Franco Colapinto.

But how justified is Williams’ call and is the young Argentine the right replacement?

Was Williams right to sack Sargeant?

His position at Williams had been tenuous for some time but, as Sargeant returned to Zandvoort to kick off the second half of the season, it looked like the American might finish his second F1 campaign after all before being replaced by Ferrari exile Carlos Sainz for 2025.

But a heavy crash in a wet FP3, destroying pretty much every corner of the car and with it a set of Williams’ long-awaited upgrades, appeared to be the final straw for Williams after what has been a frustratingly inconsistent year and a half with the team.

Sargeant lasting just one race into the second half of the season, when Williams had all summer to line up a replacement, shows team boss James Vowles moved quickly after what has been the latest costly and totally unnecessary shunt, Sargeant having dropped a wheel on the wet grass at Zandvoort’s Turn 4 in a meaningless practice session.

His crash was reminiscent of the one he suffered in FP1 at the Japanese Grand Prix, where he similarly slipped a wheel onto the grass and suffered a huge accident.

A popular saying as F1 teams approach inexperienced drivers is that it’s OK to make a mistake once, just don’t make the same mistake again. Unfortunately for Sargeant, he has just made too many of those.

There was some surprise when Vowles handed him a sophomore year after Sargeant struggled to adjust to the harsh reality of F1 last year, with his tendency to overdrive the car robbing him of opportunities to string together a consistent race weekend and start higher up the grid.

But Williams saw promise that, beneath such inconsistency, the speed was there and he could get much closer to team-mate Alex Albon’s pace, which has happened on some occasions. After all, Sargeant had run Oscar Piastri close when they were team-mates in F3, so there was a more than capable driver in there somewhere.

But that hasn’t happened often enough and, while Sargeant was dealt a tough hand at the start of the season by being a specification behind compared to Albon for a number of races, Zandvoort’s crash…