Fiery Logan Sargeant crash triggers red flag in final Dutch GP practice session

Logan Sargeant walked away from a scary crash in third practice at the Dutch Grand Prix, after making a small driving error.

The red flags were shown just under 20 minutes into a wet and gloomy practice session at Zandvoort, with Logan Sargeant crashing heavily in his Williams.

Logan Sargeant crashes his Williams at Zandvoort

Sargeant was accelerating through the Hunserug sequence of corners, Turn 5, coming out of the banked Hugenholtz, when he ran onto the grass lining the track after the exit kerbing.

With no grip on the wet grass, he lost control of his car and speared off into the Armco barriers at high speed.

The impact crumpled the fencing and bounced his Williams back onto the tarmac where it came to rest on the racing line. Thankfully, the drivers behind were amply warned of the hazard and slowed to a crawl to pass his stricken car without incident.

Under immediate red flags, Sargeant initially appeared unaware that the rear of his car had caught fire and, when communicating with his race engineer that he was uninjured, was told to jump out – which he did, before retreating behind the barrier.

Other drivers voiced their concerns as they passed the incident, with Mercedes ‘ George Russell gesturing frantically to the American driver to get out: “He’s on fire, he needs to jump out. He might be OK, but the car is on fire.”

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was also informed of his colleague’s status as he picked his way past the debris: “Sargeant had quite a big crash. He’s OK.”

Williams now faces a race against time to get the car ready for qualifying, if it’s possible to do so with such a heavily damaged chassis.

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James Vowles hints at chassis change as Logan Sargeant uninjured

Speaking to Sky F1 about the incident, Williams’ team boss James Vowles explained that his driver is uninjured.

“He jumped on the radio and said, ‘I’m okay’,” he said.

“Then, he had to jump out because the car was on fire, so I didn’t get an opportunity to talk to him. He’s down at the medical centre at the moment, I’ve just had a nod that he’s okay. So we’ll bring him back up here and have a chat.”

With Williams rolling out with upgrades to its car this weekend, Vowles was despondent over the fact the crash had wiped out quite a bit of its stock of new parts.

“There are hundreds of hours spent on this update,” he said.

“It looks like it’s working well, but there are few of them in the world. Really the worst time is when you just introduce it with small amounts of bits and you put it into the wall.

“The other difficulty is it’s FP3 and qualifying is going to be on us pretty quickly, and it’s in a pretty bad state.”

Asked whether Williams has enough parts to send Sargeant back out running the same spec that he had been running at the time of the crash, he said: “Yes is the answer, but actually, there’s a limited amount. So, if something happens now to the other car, you need to make sure, in parc ferme, you have enough spares, so that’s more what I want to evaluate now – can we service both cars to a sufficient standard?”

Unlike earlier in the year, when Williams didn’t have a spare chassis when Alex Albon crashed in Australia, Vowles confirmed another chassis is available for Sargeant – and it is likely that it will be needed.

“The first step of it is we’re going to go through in detail what has been damaged in this,” he said.

“It looks pretty serious if I’m honest, and I think that could result in a chassis change. Let’s keep an eye on what that looks like.”

The session remains under red flags, with repairs needed to the fencing before restarting.

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