Williams give Logan Sargeant second chance, retain the American for 2024 season

Logan Sargeant will keep his seat on the Formula 1 grid in 2024 after Williams decided to retain him for another season.

Sargeant will be expected to improve upon his rookie season in which he scored just one of his team's 28 Constructor's Championship points as the team finished seventh. He was the last driver on the grid to sign a deal for next year, and his retention means the grid will stay the same from 2023 to 2024.

Williams' other driver, 27-year-old Alex Albon, performed better than Sargeant in the qualifying sessions for all 22 races. The only times 22-year-old Sargeant finished a race above Albon were in the three races in which Albon did not finish.

Sargeant's won his single point at the United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, and it was something of a fluke: Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, who initially finished second and sixth respectively, were disqualified because their cars were too low to the ground. As a result, Sargeant, who initially finished 12th, was bumped up to 10th.

Sargeant will turn 23 before the 2024 season, so he is a young driver with plenty of time on his side. In fact, he was the second-youngest driver to spend the full season on the grid in 2023 behind Oscar Piastri of McLaren.

Much more will be expected from Sargeant in year two after a rookie season that pretty much amounted to a trial run for the grid's first full-time American since 2007.

In the lower levels of Formula racing, Sargeant kept pace with Piastri - who earned a podium finish in the 2023 Japan Grand Prix - in the same car in Formula 3 in 2020. Sargeant finished the season four points behind the Aussie in part due to an incident that knocked him out of the last race of the season on the first lap.

Sargeant has also asserted himself as a team's top driver in the past. In the 2021 F3 season, he finished the campaign seventh in the Drivers' Championship but scored 102 of his team's 127 points.

In the 2022 Formula 2 season, he nearly doubled the points of then-teammate Liam Lawson - who drove five races and scored two points for AlphaTauri in F1 in 2023 while Daniel Ricciardo was injured - with Sargeant scoring 115 to Lawson's 60.

Sargeant clearly has potential, or else he would not have ended up on the F1 grid. He always faced an uphill battle in a Williams car, and he spent only one year in Formula 2 compared to other drivers who had multiple years in F2 or even Formula E, the electric car racing series. 

No one is expecting race wins from a Williams driver next season, but if Sargeant can outperform Albon in just one-third of next season's races, he'll put himself in a much better position for a long Formula 1 career.