Logan Sargeant has yet to secure his first top ten finish of his rookie FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, but the young American believes he is getting closer with every race he participates in.
Sargeant joined Williams Racing at the start of the 2023 campaign but has often failed to make the performance of more experienced team-mate Alexander Albon, with his best result being an eleventh-place finish in the British Grand Prix.
Despite his lack of points, Sargeant feels he has made good progress with his driving in recent events, and he knows he will need to focus on improving this further in the second half of the year if he wants to score points.
“Ups and downs, [I’m] not where I want to be,” Sargeant is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com.
“Over the last few rounds, I feel like I’m much closer. I feel like I’ve seen really good progression as of late and that’s the most important thing.
“I think I need to clean some things up. I think, as a team collectively, we can clean some things up and that’s what we need to focus on going into the second part of the season.”
Sargeant says he has had to make small changes so he could adapt to driving Formula 1 machinery this year, and he hopes to continue this development in the second half of the year.
“It’s actually very, very small things but small things that make a big difference,” he said. “There were points in the year where I was simply holding the brake too late into the corners and slowing the minimum speed down too much. I’ve gotten on top of that.
“Just inputs in high-speed corners, causing instabilities, things like that. There are countless things. It’s all just very minor driving traits that needed to be adjusted.
“In terms of extracting everything from the car, whether that’s in quali sim, whether that’s in race trim, just the way the car needs to be driven, I’m just moving towards that step by step in many, many different ways.”
Talking about pressure, Sargeant says he has tried not to put too much onto himself as he adapts to life as a Formula 1 driver, although that does not stop him having high expectations of himself.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve put an insane amount of pressure on myself,” Sargeant added. “I think it’s been mentally challenging how many things need to be done and not having much time away from it to sort of reset. It’s just sort of mentally draining rather than super challenging.
“Obviously, I have high self-expectations. I want to drive well, I’ve frustrated myself plenty of times this year when I haven’t done what I could have done and that’s what it comes down to, it’s me expecting to get the most out of myself.
“And at times I feel like I’ve just missed the mark on that a few times. And it’s about cleaning that up, stringing it together better, executing better. And I feel like that’s the next step. Because I feel like I now have the pieces to do at all.”
