Why have Williams kept the faith in Sargeant after heavy defeat to Albon? · RaceFans

The data makes it inescapably clear just how tough a season Logan Sargeant had on his Formula 1 debut with Williams in 2023.

Last year, as he concluded his single season in Formula 2, Williams gave Sargeant a string of practice outings in order to pick up extra FIA superlicence points in order to ensure he would qualify to race in the top flight. That turned out to be unnecessary thanks to his finishing position in the top feeder series to F1.

Nonetheless, he had a difficult first year in the world championship, and the numbers below make grim reading. Not once did he out-qualify his team mate Alexander Albon, nor take the chequered flag ahead of him on merit.

We’ve seen team mate head-to-heads as bad as this in the past. But the driver on the winning side has usually been one of the sport’s top stars, as in the case of Fernando Alonso when he smashed Stoffel Vandoorne in 2018, or Max Verstappen when he beat Albon himself three years ago.

This time, however, it was Albon who dished out the beating, including a perfect score in qualifying against his younger team mate, just as he was on the receiving end of in 2020.

Some teams might not have let Sargeant see the season out with results like this. But Williams have persevered with him, and for reasons beyond the obvious marketing appeal to an American-owned team in an American-owned sport having an American driver.

Team principal James Vowles has made it clear he believes in the team’s young driver programme and is keen to give Sargeant a chance to prove himself. He knows just how difficult it is for new drivers to make the leap up into F1 due to the lack of testing opportunities.

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Sargeant makes an interesting comparison to his fellow 2023 rookies. Nyck de Vries had comparatively few testing opportunities last year and was given the boot by Red Bull and AlphaTauri before the halfway point in the season. Oscar Piastri had multiple private testing sessions with pre-2022 cars with Alpine, which clearly helped him when he returned to tracks like Losail, which he would otherwise have been unfamiliar with.

However Sargeant did show genuine potential. His race pace was often reasonable, though hamstrung by poor starting positions.

Although his qualifying was clearly not on par with Albon’s, he got close at times, and showed potential to do better when he didn’t transgress track limits – as at the season finale – or crash. He also showed improvement in the…