This Week in F1: Why Williams Don't Trust Sargeant, Max's Melbourne Misery & More [08]
Williams make an interesting call to have Sargeant sit out the Australian GP and Verstappen breezes through another weekend - or does he? All that and more...
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There’s plenty to discuss this week, so let get into it right away…
Williams Don’t Trust Sargeant?
You read that correctly, Williams don’t really trust Sargeant’s capabilities despite backing him heavily throughout all of his questionable performances.
Where is my evidence for this claim, though? Well, this weekend Alex Albon (Williams’ lead driver) crashed out of turn 6/7 during one of the free practice sessions. His car was well and truly destroyed after bouncing between the walls of the track several times.
This is the interesting bit though, Williams didn’t bring a spare chassis to the venue, which is normally common practice for most teams. Had they brought a spare chassis, Williams would have been able to repair Albon’s car in time for running on Saturday.
But they couldn’t do this because they didn’t bring one! The reason they didn’t have one was most likely due to the ongoing affect of outdated and slow equipment and infrastructure, meaning that now, even 3 races into the season, the team are left struggling to put together a spare chassis.
So what solution did Williams come up with? Did they just call it a day for Albon and accept that he wouldn’t participate throughout the rest of the weekend, it was his fault after all… But no, Albon is Williams’ best driver, and the only one they can actually trust to score some valuable points for the team - so they decided to kick Sargeant out of his seat for the weekend.
This properly demonstrates that Williams ‘support’ Sargeant, until times like these. It makes you wonder; did Williams even mean any of what they’ve said about Sargeant?
I don’t believe they genuinely see true potential in Logan Sargeant, otherwise they would have left him to drive for the team for the rest of the weekend. This shows the world that Sargeant is a ‘the best we can do’ kind of driver for Williams, even they don’t actually want him to be a core part of the team.
The American was a late signer for Williams at the end of 2022, as they scrambled to find a replacement for their previous driver, Nicholas Latifi. Is safe to say that Sargeant isn’t their dream driver, but they are making do with him for now…
This must really be a stab in the back for Sargeant, who was made to feel as though he was supported and backed by the team - who knows what kind of tensions could boil up throughout the season…
Do you think Williams will be interested in extending Sargeants contract beyond the end of this year? Let me know in the comments!
Smoooooooth Operation in Australia!
For once, actually the second time in recent memory, the Smooth Operator (Carlos Sainz) comes to the rescue!
Just as some background, I decided to skip this race because it was on at 4AM (no way I’m getting up then!) here in the UK, so you can imagine the suprise I had when waking up and finding out that anyone but Max Verstappen took the win. I was very happy :)
How did someone else win? It wasn’t Maximum Verstappen that made a mistake - his car did. To be fair, it really wasn’t Verstappen’s fault that he DNF’d, it was a simple engine failure that knocked him out of the race on just lap 4 - his first DNF since this very race in 2022!
But that hardly takes away from the enjoyment of hearing something other than the Dutch national anthem on the podium, and who else would take the win than Carlos Sainz, the only non-Red-Bull winner since 2022.
What truly made this a special Grand Prix was Max’s absence, and I mean that in the nicest possible way… We saw far more overtakes up and down the field than we ever would do normally, and way more action and close racing throughout the race.
It did also help that Hamilton had an engine failure, and Russel crashed out on the penultimate lap, taking both of the almost garunteed points-scoring Mercedes out of the equation.
This left 3 normally occupied points-positions become vacant, meaning that we saw the VCARB of Tsunoda and the 2 Haas cars rounding out the top 10, making this one the least predictable races we’ve had in the last 2 years!
FUN FACT: Out of the previous 2 non-Verstappen wins, Carlos Sainz has been the winner, and Geroge Russel has crashed into the wall on the final laps! What a weird conincidence…
That was just a breif overview of what went down in Australia, but let’s take a look at all the key information coming out of the race:
Here’s all the essentials from the race:
FASTEST LAP - Charles Leclerc (1:19.813)
PODIUM POSITIONS - Sainz [1st] , Leclerc [2nd] , Norris [3rd]
WHO CAME LAST - Esteban Ocon (Alpine)
DHL FASTEST PIT-STOP - ??? (couldn’t find anywhere - comment if you know!)
DRIVER OF THE DAY - Carlos Sainz (Ferrari)
DRIVER STANDINGS - [1] Verstappen, [2] Leclerc, [3] Perez, [4] Sainz, [5] Piastri
CONSTRUCTOR STANDINGS - Red Bull, Ferrari, Mclaren, Mercedes, Aston Martin
Contoversial Penalties for Alonso…
To finish off this week’s newsletter, I thought I’d take a quick look at Alonso’s strage pentalty that was dished out well after the race had ended - adding 20 SECONDS! to his finishing time. That’s gone and demoted the Spaniard down to P8 after he received a triple penalty.
The reason for the penalty; in the laps before Russel crashed (Russel was closely following Alosno at this point) Alsonso’s driving was deemed “potentially dangerous” by the stewards.
In all fairness, Alonso did take a very slow approach to the corner “lifting over 100m earlier than normal” and “braking at a point he would never normally brake at during the corner”. Alonso was seeming to blame for Russel crashing out of the race, as he swerved off-track to avoid a collision with Alonso.
Russel felt that Alsonso’s driving in that corner was very erratic, and he didn’t expect to close his gap to Alonso by such a dramatic amount through that corner.
At this time, Alonso hasn’t clarified if his driving was with the intent of slowing Russel, or just in the interest of gaining a better exit out of the corner - we’ll have to wait and see how the Spaniard responds.
Is a 20 second penalty too harsh for an incident that may not have even been Alonso’s fault? Do you think it’s justified? Let me know in the comments…
And that’s all for this week!
Thanks for reading FastTrack F1, if you enjoyed the quick recap of this week’s news, be sure to subscribe for more weekly recaps and leave a comment if you have anything to discuss (or correct me on). I’ll see you next week for some more news :)