Following months of giving Logan Sargeant the benefit of the doubt, a costly crash in Zandvoort has finally prompted Williams to replace him with youngster Franco Colapinto. How justified is Williams' call and is the young Argentine the right replacement?
Was Williams right to sack Sargeant?
His position at Williams had been tenuous for some time, but as Sargeant returned to Zandvoort to kick off the second half of the season it looked like the American might finish his second F1 season after all before being replaced by Ferrari exile Carlos Sainz for 2025.
But a heavy crash in a wet FP3, destroying pretty much every corner of the car and with it a set of Williams' long-awaited upgrades, appeared to be the final straw for Williams after what has been an frustratingly inconsistent year and a half with the team.
Sargeant lasting just one race into the second half of the season, when Williams had all summer to line up a replacement, shows team boss James Vowles moved quickly to find a replacement after what has been the latest costly and totally unnecessary shunt, with Sargeant dropping a wheel on the wet grass at Zandvoort's Turn 4 in a meaningless practice session.
His crash was reminiscent of the one he suffered in FP1 at the Japanese Grand Prix, where he similarly dropped a wheel on the grass and suffered a huge accident.
A popular saying as F1 teams approach inexperienced drivers is that it's okay to make a mistake once. Just don't make the same mistake again. Unfortunately for Sargeant, he has just made too many of those.
There was some surprise when Vowles handed him a sophomore year after struggling to adjust to the harsh reality of F1 last year, with his tendency to overdrive the car robbing him of opportunities to string together a consistent race weekend and start higher up the grid.
But Williams saw promise that when he didn't do so, the speed was there and he could get much closer to team-mate Alex Albon's pace, which has happened on some occasions. After all Sargeant had run Oscar Piastri close when they were team-mates in F3, so there was a more than capable driver in there somewhere.
But that hasn't happened often enough, and while Sargeant was dealt a tough hand at the start of the season by being a specification behind compared to Albon for a number of races, Zandvoort's crash shows why that may have been prudent for a team that was running low on spare parts.
In his dealings with the media Sargeant had grown visibly frustrated by this lack of equal treatment, the noise around his lack of results and his potential successor, which will end up being Sainz. Being parked in Melbourne because Albon crashed in practice and Williams didn't have a spare car available must have been particularly demoralising.
But once he did get the same parts he continued to be outqualified and outraced by his more experienced team-mate, ending his season on 14-2 in qualifying, with just a single points to his name at last year's US Grand Prix.
Williams' major upgrade push in Zandvoort is part of the equation, because after a humbling season start with an overweight car the team believes it is finally going to get more opportunities to score points and it needs two drivers who can deliver those.
Vowles and his team might be focused on 2026 and beyond, but they are currently languishing in ninth with just four points in the bank and are desperate to turn that around.
“To replace a driver mid-season is not a decision we have taken lightly, but we believe this gives Williams the best chance to compete for points over the remainder of the season," Vowles said in the release accompanying the news.
"We have just brought a large upgrade to the car and need to maximise every points-scoring opportunity in a remarkably tight midfield battle."
Is rookie Colapinto the right replacement instead of Schumacher or Lawson?
That need to have a fast, steady part of hands alongside Albon that can fight for points immediately makes Franco Colapinto a puzzling replacement at first glance. It has ditched a 23-year-old for a 21-year-old rookie with a grand total of one free practice session under his belt at the British Grand Prix, which followed a rookie test run in Abu Dhabi.
When quizzed by Motorsport.com on Colapinto's FP1 run at the time, Vowles said: "It was a reward for a very strong Formula 2 season. I like recognising that we have a strong young driver programme.
"I believe that you really can burn a driver if you put them in the car too soon. And actually in modern day Formula 1, what you're seeing is rookies are struggling as a result of things.
"Actually, our investment, our commitment to them has to be an amount of time in a historic car, an amount of time with preparation to make sure that if we choose them to go forward, they're effectively in the strongest place they can be. And we haven't provided that to Franco at this point."
Whether Colapinto is in the strongest place he can be to make a full F1 debut remains to be seen, then, even if by all accounts he did a solid job at Silverstone and gave a mature impression in his media dealings afterwards.
The Argentine known he has nothing to lose, because the seat he slides into will not be his to keep in 2025 regardless of how well he does. But beyond shining a light on its own academy programme, Williams must clearly like what it has seen from him in both and F1 and an F2 car.
Williams didn't have an embarrassment of riches to choose from either, with Mercedes reserve and Alpine WEC driver Mick Schumacher and Red Bull reserve Liam Lawson known to be under consideration last weekend.
Some, like Mercedes chief Toto Wolff, feel F1 hasn't seen the real Mick after two tough seasons with a struggling Haas squad, while others insist Schumacher has had his chance unlike, say, fellow F2 champion Felipe Drugovich. And with the number of crashes that punctuated the German's F1 stint, it may have well scared off Williams to replace one erratic driver by another.
Lawson would have been by far the most logical pick, given his impressive and mature cameo subbing for the injured Daniel Ricciardo at AlphaTauri last year. With Red Bull seemingly committed to handing the New Zealander a place on the grid next year either inside or outside the Red Bull family, giving Lawson another nine races would have been the perfect preparation, even if he has already shown he can jump in at the deep end and deliver.
But Lawson's position as Red Bull's reserve driver for all of its four seats across two teams looks set to have been a dealbreaker. "It would depend on which terms and if we needed him back that we could have him back quite quickly," Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said on Sunday. "But if they needed a driver next weekend, we'd certainly be open to that."
With Williams needing consistency and results across the final nine races, the prospect of having to give Lawson back to Red Bull on short notice whenever one of its four drivers was unavailable may have been too much of a risk to take.
Its bold decision to go with unproven Colapinto is a risk too, and only time well tell how that will pan out. But while continuing with Sargeant was a dead end, at least it will have the potential upside of further developing a homegrown talent who may well become a good future prospect.
