With Logan Sargeant’s Ouster, American F1 Opportunities Slim

The crash did not total the chassis but destroyed everything else with the car. In the current cost-cap era, teams cannot afford unnecessary wrecks like that – especially something that was so obviously a driving fault.

This idea needs to preface the rest of this article: Sargeant is a good race car driver. He genuinely is, and he will win wherever he decides to go next.

But good drivers just do not cut it in the biggest race series in the world, one which is limited to just 20 spots on the grid.

Sargeant seemed to marginally improve this season, but he never once qualified ahead of teammate Alexander Albon. Sargeant never finished ahead of Albon when both had classified race results in the same grand prix.

The first rule of Formula 1 is to beat your teammate, and Sargeant utterly failed to do this throughout his F1 career. In one season, Nicholas Latifi beat Albon four times in races and three times in qualifying before being replaced by Sargeant for a year and a half.

Even Nikita Mazepin, generally considered one of the worst F1 drivers in the last 10 years, beat teammate Mick Schumacher six times in his one season at Haas.

I could easily reference Mazepin and Latifi’s head-to-heads because I wrote about them precisely 11 months ago, in a column where I argued Williams really shouldn’t bring Sargeant back the next year.

They ended up doing so, and it still just did not work. The Australian fiasco this season, where he wrecked and wiped out the car’s chassis, killed any faith Sargeant still had in the team, and everyone in the paddock knew he would be gone after that.

With Sargeant dismissed, America once again lacks an F1 driver to call its own. Looking at the current feeder lineups, there’s not a lot of hope for a driver to emerge representing Uncle Sam.

Maybe an American can…