24 August 2024 , 11:15
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Final practice at Zandvoort was stopped for a lengthy delay after a big Logan Sargeant crash which forced him to flee his Williams which had caught fire after the impact
Logan Sargeant leapt to safety after a huge crash saw his Williams burst into flames.
Final practice ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix was stopped for a significant period after the American lost control in the wet conditions. The Williams slid off track and smashed into the barriers before coming back onto the tarmac and coming to a stop.
Sargeant was unharmed but wasn’t yet out of danger. He seemed to be unaware of the flames coming out of the back of his car despite reporting his condition over the radio, promoting his race engineer to tell him he needed to evacuate the cockpit.
George Russell, who was one of the first to pass the stricken Williams, also slowed down and gestured to Sargeant that he needed to flee. And he said the same thing over the radio while his Mercedes race engineer also warned that one of the car’s tyres was loose and rolling along the track.
Fortunately, Sargeant got out of the car in time and was walking away from the wreckage as marshals rushed towards it. Eventually, the flames were extinguished and a recovery vehicle was able to take it back to the pit lane. TV pictures later showed the driver walking back to the pit lane after a brief check-over in the medical centre.
But it would be some time before the session was able to resume. The impact had done a lot of damage to the barrier that it had hit which needed to be repaired before race control deemed it safe for others to head back out onto the circuit again.
And that was not the only repair job needed at Zandvoort. The other was in the Williams garage as Sargeant’s mechanics were presented with the unenviable task of getting the car back into shape to be able to take part in qualifying just a few hours later.
Logan Sargeant walked away from the crash unharmed ( Image: Formula 1 via Getty Images)
Williams team principal James Vowles bemoaned the timing of the accident and said: "There’s no good time [for such a crash]. Hundreds of hours have been spent on this upgrade kit and it looks like it’s working well. There’s a few of them in the world and the worst time is when you’ve just introduced a small amount of bits and they you put it into a wall.
"The difficult is that it’s FP3, so qualifying will be upon us pretty quickly. I’m sure you saw from the images, and I can see it behind me now, it’s in a pretty bad state." He confirmed that there were spare parts for the new upgrade to give Sargeant the same spec machine once it is fixed, but is hoping that there will be no more crash damage.
Vowles added: "There’s a limited amount, so if something happens to the other car you need to make sure that in parc ferme you have enough spares. That’s what I want to evaluate now - when we’re in parc ferme conditions, can we service both cars?"