Logan Sargeant’s Williams catches fire in final Dutch GP practice after scary crash

Logan Sargeant’s Williams F1 car was engulfed in flames after a heavy shunt in the opening part of final practice at the Dutch Grand Prix.

Sargeant lost control of his Williams on the exit of Turn 4 after putting his front-right tyre on the grass.

His car was spent spinning into the barriers, completely destorying the rear-end of his Williams.

Sargeant’s car caught fire in the process.

Sargeant immediately reported that he was OK - but his chances of taking part in qualifying are probably unlikely.

The session was subsequently red-flagged for a lengthy period. 

Final practice has been a difficult session for a number of drivers due to the tricky conditions.

Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg hit the wall at Turn 11 - damaging his front wing entirely.

It's been a tough season overall for Sargeant, who will be replaced by Carlos Sainz for 2025.

It means his F1 career is effectively over.

However, Williams boss James Vowles was complimentary about Sargeant's progress this year despite failing to pick up a point.

He told media including Crash.net in the FIA press conference on Friday: "I mean, one of the strengths that's underrated in his regard is he has a huge mental resilience. We just spoke about it a second ago. But he takes a punishment in the media, in the world, really, almost weekend on weekend. But when it comes the following weekend, he's cleared his mind of that. 

"And he's here just to perform fundamentally. And he builds up to the weekend in the way it needs to be. And it's not that he hasn't progressed. If you look across the last 18 months, you can clearly see that from where he was to where he is now in terms of number of mistakes, proximity to Alex, where he's qualifying and where he achieves, how many seconds behind he's finishing now. 

"It is all on the right journey. What he's very good at doing now, which was a weakness beforehand, was building up into the weekend, fundamentally. So finding the limit, but approaching it from a bottom up perspective rather than top down. Because top down, when you make one mistake, you lose a session and you start to put yourself at risk. 

"I think he's matured a lot as a driver, his own words rather than mine, but he's able to deal with the pressure and what comes at you much, much better as a result of it now. And he's also using a lot more of the tools that are available to him both within the car and outside of the car within the engineering systems that we have, et cetera. So those are all good progresses."