Williams recruited Franco Colapinto for the remainder of the 2024 Formula 1 season from Monza onwards but it had other options: Liam Lawson and Mick Schumacher.
So why did Williams choose Colapinto – and why did it feel keeping incumbent Logan Sargeant in the seat was untenable?
The Formula 2 graduate will become the first Argentinian driver to race in F1 in more than two decades when he makes his debut at the 2024 Italian Grand Prix.
Colapinto, 21, is a product of the Williams academy and, although he won’t race for Williams in 2025 as Carlos Sainz will join from Ferrari, he has a chance to make an impact with his mid-season call-up.
Williams team boss James Vowles explained at Monza that Colapinto was considered alongside former Haas driver Schumacher and Red Bull junior Lawson.
Lawson a non-starter
“With Liam, the contractual sort of position of Red Bull wouldn’t have worked with me here at Williams,” said Vowles, “so that didn’t become an option for us in that circumstance.
“And then it’s a tough choice.”
Lawson, who finished third in the 2022 F2 championship, is Red Bull’s reserve driver. He too made his F1 debut mid-season, having stepped in for an injured Daniel Ricciardo from a stint starting with the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix.
Red Bull boss Christian Horner had indicated at Zandvoort he would’ve been amenable to loaning Lawson to Williams, but only if Red Bull “could have him back quite quickly” if it wanted to make a line-up change of its own.
This is likely the hurdle Vowles is referencing above, given Williams would obviously prefer to avoid any further line-up alterations that would come with an all-new adaptation process.
Schumacher loses out
As for Schumacher, he is currently Mercedes’ F1 reserve.
The 25-year-old is also part of Alpine’s World Endurance Championship line-up this year and was a – very much outside – contender for the 2025 Alpine F1 seat eventually taken up by Jack Doohan.
“Mick has improved a lot from where he was in Haas, there was no doubt about it,” explained Vowles.
“He’s a competent driver that I know had his time, but he has done incredible work with Alpine, with Mercedes and with McLaren [whose F1 cars Schumacher has also tested] in the meantime, and all advocates, if you speak to them, will tell you where he’s adapted and where he’s changed.
“So now the decision is, do we put Mick in the car, [in] which I think Mick would have done a good job.
“Or do we invest in an individual that’s a part of our academy, that’s done hundreds to thousands of laps in our simulator, that’s driven the car, the only driver to have driven the car this year in FP1, and on the data that we can see from what he’s doing and how he’s performing, he’s making significant steps?”
Vowles then said “both would fall into a category of good, not special” – comments that created a social media storm later on Friday.
“I think we have to be straightforward about this – Mick isn’t special; he would just been good,” Vowles continued.
He later clarified in an interview with F1’s in-house TV feed that his use of “special” had been “in the context of multiple world champions like Ayrton Senna fundamentally, Lewis [Hamilton] as well”, which he admitted was “foolish” and said he had “apologised to Mick” for his phrasing.
“He didn’t request anything,” Vowles told F1 TV, “but it’s important to me, because he’s incredibly close to me, and it just came across entirely the wrong way.
“So more than anything else, I wanted that to be abundantly clear. Don’t doubt his abilities, but we as Williams have to go with our Academy. It makes sense what we’re doing.”
The case for Colapinto
“Here’s what I believe in, what Williams believes in, and what’s in the core values of Williams,” Vowles said. “Williams has always invested in new generations of drivers and youth, and what I’ve been speaking about all the way through is the investment in the future of Williams.
“And the future of Williams isn’t investing in the past. It’s investing in talent that allows us to move forward as individuals.
“I myself, 25 years ago, was a junior, and someone trusted me and believed in me and invested in me, and we had good hope that came out of it.
“Franco’s ahead in the F2 championship of [Kimi] Antonelli. He’s ahead of [Oliver] Bearman. He’s in MP – with all due respect to MP, it’s not Prema, it’s not ART. And he’s doing a good job in building up into it.
“Now do I think we’ve put someone really in the deep end of the swimming pool? Absolutely, 100 percent but if you listen to Franco’s own words, you’ll hear that he’s ready for it, that he’s ready for the challenge, that he knows what’s in front of him.”
While Williams is bringing Argentinian sponsors on board, Vowles made it clear this was an after-effect of the Colapinto promotion rather than a condition or a factor in the decision.
And he said that, rather than Colapinto’s F2 campaign with the aforementioned MP Motorsport that had left him in sixth place at the time of its F1-necessitated interruption, it’s “the bits that you wouldn’t have seen” that impressed him the most about Colapinto, namely his progress as part of his regular F1 simulator work.
What really ended the Sargeant experiment
Before all that, though, came the decision to move on from Sargeant.
This felt a distinctly possible outcome in the aftermath of Sargeant’s weekend-conditioning shunt in Dutch Grand Prix practice – a shunt which damaged a fresh upgrade package at that – but Vowles emphasised this wasn’t quite the last straw.
“My thought process actually was, you don’t – if you react emotionally, you’re going to make some bad decisions. One of the first things I did is not react to the crash. In fact, isolated myself here [in the Williams motorhome] – because the emotion involved in taking hundreds of hours of update kits and watching them burn is pretty painful. And that’s purposely why I removed myself from that.
“It’s also purposely why the decision was taken much later on, i.e. after the race weekend. And I wanted to be performance-based, because performance is at the core of everything.
“Accidents will happen. They will happen with Alex [too] – they have happened with Alex. It’s not just an accident. It has to be [that] you’re earning your place in the sport.
“And with Logan, what I wanted to do is give what I thought was sufficient time for him to demonstrate where he is on tracks that I know we can perform at.
“After the race on Sunday and I dug through his data with enough detail to see where he was performance-wise, what was happening.
“And it wasn’t one area. There was a lack, still, of tyre management, a lack of pace. And where he finished was just too far back.”
