Vowles details Sargeant’s new F1 approach

Williams Team Principal James Vowles has detailed Logan Sargeant’s new approach to race weekends that he will utilise this year.

During his rookie campaign last season, Sargeant endured a challenging period with several on-track errors putting his place within the team in question.

Williams waited until after the conclusion of the year to confirm Sargeant’s extension for the upcoming campaign.

The American driver has already revealed that he has put on five kilograms as he aims for a more competitive season in his second season.

“First and foremost, I’ve asked him to surprise the world in terms of his physical fitness, his approach and his performance,” Vowles told media including RacingNews365.

“We’ve changed quite a bit with him across the winter period; his training mechanisms and programme is completely different behind the scenes.

“Already, you should see he’s very much a more confident person, and he carries that well.

“There will be a reset. It’s very hard for racing drivers across this period when they finish the last race and it’s early December and then start again in late February to be right on the money straightaway – he won’t be.

“What I’ve asked him to do is to approach the first few days driving the car with caution again, the same way he did at the end of the year, build up into it and don’t try and rush into success and don’t be disappointed if success doesn’t come to you immediately.

“That’s the confidence I place in him. That’s why he’s back in the car, and that openness to it, that discussion even provides him an arena where he knows he can start pushing himself and the team around him in order to get success out of it.”

'Gap to Albon closer than it seems'

Sargeant was the only driver that failed to out-qualify his team-mate at least once last year with Alex Albon coming out on top at all 22 events.

However Vowles asserted that the gap between the two wasn’t as major as presented on the surface.

“At the end of the year, I was pretty open about this, perhaps midway through the year, his car wasn’t in the same specs of Alex,” he said.

“We were running out of bits because I was putting our focus in 2024. I didn’t want to spend time building new bits, I want to spend time building next year’s success, and the result of that is that he was slightly down on performance.

“So at times where the world thought he was really underperforming, it wasn’t as offset as people felt.

“At the end of the year, when they were on the same equipment, he started to fall right back into where I needed him to be – and what I’ve asked him to do is that momentum needs to continue

“I need him now in the winter to not go back to his old ways of driving, where he’s trying to extract too much from himself and the car too quickly, but rather approach things progressively.

“We should have a car that is more suiting to both drivers, hoping that we’ve got rid of some of these really nasty effects from last year, but then we’ll also make a platform for him where he should be able to grow much quicker than he did in 2023.”