Vowles: Lawson deserving of a seat, Sargeant is quick

American rookie, Sargeant, has been under the spotlight lately and for the wrong reasons and his continued to struggle on his debut season that has been marred with errors and crashes, not to mention being woefully off the pace.

Vowles has said before that Williams also shoulder some blame with regards to Sargeant's struggles while simultaneously insisting the 21-year-old should up his game and prove himself worthy of an F1 seat.

He reiterated his sentiments in Qatar last weekend, he said: "We have a responsibility both as a team, because we’ve brought Logan in with very minimal amounts of testing. If you compare, for example, even to Oscar [Piastri] on the grid, Oscar was taking a year of just doing F1 testing [in 2022], and he’s doing an excellent job with it.

"We have a responsibility to Logan to make sure we’ve given him every opportunity to succeed, and I don’t believe we’ve done that yet, which is why my commentary is quite clear in the media," Vowles insisted.

The Williams Team Principal gave an example of Sargeant's form in practice for the Qatar Grand Prix, to back his claims that the young American F1 drivers has decent pace.

He pointed out: "Again, you saw in an FP1 session, he’s actually doing a good job, again putting himself in the top 10 [when] we weren’t doing anything special with him.

"He is quick – what’s not coming together is the whole package at the moment. We’ve spoken about that fairly openly.

"At the end of the year, we’ll all know, and I’ll be able to look him in the eyes and know that we’ve given him the best opportunity, or that he is absolutely going to be in the car next year, but let’s provide him the time to be able to do that," the Briton maintained.

Over at AlphaTauri, Lawson who was filling in for Daniel Ricciardo, will have to switch into a reserve role in 2024 at Red Bull, as the Faenza squad confirmed Riccardo and Yuki Tsunoda for next season.

With the only unconfirmed seat on the grid being Sargeant's Williams seat, it was pointed out to Vowles that Lawson was a free agent.

However the former Mercedes strategy boss dodged the Lawson reference, diverting the discussion towards the lack of opportunities F1 provided for rookie drivers to develop.

He said: "I think we as a sport have a responsibility to perhaps relook at the rules and say, how do we introduce rookie drivers to it?

"You can see Liam will be sidelined, but I think he’s absolutely deserving of a seat on this grid, and it’s a reflection I think of these difficult Sprint race formats, followed by one-hour sessions, followed by a lack of opportunity to grow," Vowles concluded.