Sargeant: Old-spec front wing on FW45 'hurt balance' at Monza

Logan Sargeant believes he would have achieved a much better result in last Sunday's Italian Grand Prix had his car been fitted – like Alex Albon – with Williams' latest front wing.

While Albon's efforts yielded a remarkable seventh-place finish at Monza, Sargeant struggled with excessive tyre degradation that left the American just P13 at the end of the day.

Williams has purposefully split its front wing options between its two drivers, and the older element proved detrimental to its car's balance on Monza's low-downforce layout.

"Lesmo one and two and the Parabolica was just honestly just trying to keep the car under me,” Sargeant said after last Sunday's race as he recounted his afternoon.

"The rear was super light. I had to run a different spec front wing this weekend. I think that's what really hurt our balance.

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"I think if we had the normal one, we would have been okay and it would have honestly made a big difference in terms of [tyre] degradation.

"It is what it is. We'll keep working hard. We put everything together as well as we could and it wasn’t enough.

"So we’ll go back to the drawing board and see what we can do for Singapore. Pieces are coming together, just not as fast as I hoped."

Williams head of vehicle performance Dave Robson justified the team's decision to allocate the older-spec rear wing to Sargeant as it did not want to jeopardize its already short supply of the new component in light of Sargeant's pair of crashes endured at Zandvoort the week before.

"So, obviously, he has had it," Robson explained. "But following [Zandvoort], we weren't quite so confident to put them onto both cars.

"I think for the rest of the season, we're just going to have to juggle which wing is best for which circuit, for which driver and I think we'll see them mix and match.

"Sometimes they'll be on the same. Sometimes they won’t. We just have to manage that stock level.

"[We’re] concerned about parc ferme risk, if we lose one in qualifying, then we’d have to start from the pit-lane.

"But equally, we don't want to have to make more front wings just to see us through the last round of races."

Ahead of last Sunday's race, Robson acknowledged that Sargeant's FW45, due to its configuration, would be less performant than Albon's Williams.

"It is fair to say that he's running a slightly older front wing here, which definitely [means] less performance," said the British engineer.

"Plus, his power unit is older just because we brought the new one for Alex in Canada, I think to make the most of that package on his car.

"So they're a bit out of sequence. So obviously, Logan will get the power advantage at later circuits, but I think his car is probably, a tenth or two slower than Alex’s."

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