Williams heads into this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix with a spare chassis for the first time in the 2024 season.
Logan Sargeant missed the Australian Grand Prix in late March as Alex Albon crashed his car in FP1 and was given the Floridian’s FW46 for the remainder of the weekend once FP2 had been completed by his teammate.
Speaking about it during his Thursday media session, the Thai driver explained it’s an important moment as the Grove-based squad can now start to focus on developments.
“Arriving. Not here right now [the spare chassis], but it will be here.
“Yeah, I mean, truthfully it doesn’t really change anything. It hasn’t since the start of the year, still driving the same.
“But it’s nice to know that there’s a bit of a safety net at any moment.
“So yeah, obviously it’s been a lot of effort from the team. It feels like we’ve been playing catch up for most of the year.
“We are generally [fine] on parts now, and with the chassis, things are just becoming a little bit more settled.
“Hopefully we can now really start to focus more on the upgrades and general development.”
Miami is round 6 of the 2024 season and is already the third one on the calendar that is a street circuit.
With Monaco to follow later this month, having a spare chassis is absolutely critical should something go wrong like it did for Albon in FP1 at Albert Park.
“You go to more and more street races now, and quite a condensed [schedule with] street tracks, thinking about Jeddah, Melbourne, here.
“So there is an emphasis more than ever to have a spare chassis for the start of the year.”
Nonetheless, it’s not something the 28-year-old has been thinking about when driving the car. It sounds bad of me to say, I don’t think about it. I think I’ve said it before, but if you start thinking about it, you’re already at a loss.
With the spare chassis fully built and ready to go, Williams can now finally start to focus on updating the FW46 as RB F1 and Haas have gained a solid advantage on them at the start of the season in terms of pace and points. They sit P8 in the standings, 7 and 5 points behind the aforementioned teams.
“I think it’s more of a way to get everything in order now and focus on true development of the car.
“We have been delayed in terms of not coming up with a car that should have already turned out.
“But already this week we have a couple of little things. Next time some more things to help our chase to get back into the midfield fight.
“If you look at the results recently, the Haas’ and RBs have slowly started to pull away — we just need to get back into that pack.”
