For the first time since he was removed from his Williams F1 seat following the Dutch Grand Prix, Logan Sargeant has driven a single-seater, running at Thermal for Meyer Shank Racing IndyCar team during a test on Tuesday.
The 23-year-old Floridian completed 84 laps on the day, finishing in P3, 0.192s behind pacesetter and another former F1 driver, Felipe Nasr.
Despite some suggestions from other drivers that a modern IndyCar machine has a similar feeling to an F2 car, Sargeant explained it felt very different to anything he’s driven previously.
On the test itself, understanding the tyres and their peakiness was the trickiest thing.
“I thought the Indy car was fun for sure, it’s very different from any other car that I have driven before.
“I felt like we were chipping away at it throughout the day and were trying some different set-up stuff — some good, some bad.
“I’d say the most surprising thing was how the tyres were pretty ‘peaky.’ They were pretty difficult to nail on a lap, I had thought that they would have a bit of a longer peak.
“Working with MSR has been amazing. Everyone on the team is great to work with, everyone is super nice. It’s a great atmosphere here and I had a nice time working with them.”
Team owner Mike Shank also talked about the day and giving Logan Sargeant an opportunity to test and IndyCar machine.
Meyer Shank Racing had a turbulent 2024. Tom Blomquist was dropped after crashing out on the opening lap of the Indy 500. Helio Castroneves subbed in for the next two rounds.
The team gave David Malukas an opportunity for the rest of 2024 after his brutal dropping by Arrow McLaren thanks to injuries sustained in a biking accident in pre-season.
It paid off as he got the #66 into the Leaders Circle at season’s end.
MSR will have a line-up of Felix Rosenqvist and Marcus Armstrong in 2025, but Shank says they were keen to evaluate Sargeant and give him a chance to test.
“The goal was to have a look at him.
“We’ve always felt that he deserves a shot at something over here, whether it’s in INDYCAR or GTP or whatever the future may hold. We went ahead and had a good, strong look at him.
“He’s one of those top F2 guys and he got his shot at F1 and now he has a shot at INDYCAR and we really wanted to see what he was all about.”
Shank was impressed by how quickly Sargeant learned things, and how he was able to help Honda as well on the day.
“He (Sargeant) was everything that I had hoped for and he caught on really quick.
“He helped us through a lot of things that we had to get through with Honda and he was pretty much what I expected to be honest.
“And on top of that he is just a good person, we like to have good people around. You never know what may happen in the future, but we now know what we have with him for sure.”
