Logan Sargeant: In his engineer's words

Logan Sargeant will get to run the FW44 during FP1 at the 2022 United States Grand Prix, and who better to get us up to speed with how he operates than by chatting to the man who is by his side every race weekend in Formula 2. So, ahead of the summer break, we caught up with the 21-year-old American's Race Engineer at Carlin, Matt Ogle.

“I’m Logan’s dedicated Race Engineer. We have five engineers on the team with an F2 team limited to 12 people.

“On the engineering staff, each car has one Race Engineer and one Data Engineer or Performance Engineer. Then we have a Chief Engineer, Stefan, who oversees the whole Engineer Department.

“My primary role is to debrief Logan before and after the sessions, make quick decisions on the pit wall concerning strategy - whether before the race or during qualifying.”

“When you’ve got a good driver like Logan, it’s a lot of fun.”

“It goes without saying, we’re all really pleased and happy. We’ve put in a massive amount of work since the beginning of the season.

“Improving pit stops in particular, but also working on car setup, adapting to any differences in the tyres to previous years, any tweaks to circuits.

“To get some good results in the second quarter of the season is great, it means a lot to all of us.”

“We know Logan well as a team; we’ve worked with him a few times before. I also personally ran him in 2019, so I know he’s good, I know what he’s capable of.

“But, there were a few, let’s call them, rookie errors that he made early on in the season. But, each one he’s made, he’s only made once, and he’s learnt from all those mistakes.

“Right now, he’s in a really good place mentally, he’s at one with the car, he feels confident with the car.”

“Technically, he’s pretty good on the brakes. Taking things back to his first push lap during practice back at the Red Bull Ring, when you consider the fuel onboard and having not driven the track ever in an F2 car, his first push lap was only three tenths slower than his best of the whole session.

“He was really, really on it from the very beginning, and that’s what he’s able to on the circuits he knows.

“Monaco, Jeddah, Baku - those sorts of tracks - he took a little bit of time to wind up and get up to speed, but now we’re on the tracks that he knows, he’s absolutely on it from the first lap in Practice, and that makes a big difference to where you qualify.

“Historically, I always think he’s been a great qualifier. But, he perhaps didn’t optimise some of the races in F3 that he should have.

“Mentally, he is cool – he’s a cool guy when he’s out of the car and he’s very self-analytical, but when he’s in the car, he is quite aggressive and he is quite straight to the point on the radio.

“He says what he needs to say, he gets it out, and, as you saw in Race 2 in Austria, he is aggressive and when he wants to get past someone he gets the job done.”