After his abrupt Williams Formula 1 exit, Logan Sargeant will get back behind the wheel of a single-seater in IndyCar next month - but the team testing him can't sign him.
Sargeant was dropped by Williams after the Dutch Grand Prix in late-August, with rookie Franco Colapinto called up to replace him, and that's left Sargeant contemplating a seven-month wait to get back to racing full-time.
Bridging that gap is a trip to California on November 19 at the Thermal Club circuit, which was used for a non-points IndyCar race earlier this year and is part of a facility built for members to test their own machinery at.
Sargeant will test there with the Meyer Shank Racing team, which has recently confirmed a contract extension for Felix Rosenqvist and signed Sargeant’s ex-single-seater rival Marcus Armstrong from Ganassi, filling its two cars for next year.
So why test Sargeant?
"Anytime we get an opportunity to look at an A-level, superlicence holder, we need to do that," team co-owner Mike Shank tells The Race.
"Obviously it's not going to do anything for us in 2025 but remember, I have a sportscar team, too, and I've got other things that we do.
"So there are areas that would be good for Logan, even if it's not right away with us.
"I think it's a great opportunity for him to get in a proper car, proper test with some simulation time before he gets in. We'll give him a full go at this.
"It's always great to be able to have looks at people, and this is primarily the reason we're doing it."
The Race brings up a similar test the team ran with Nyck de Vries in December 2021, even when it was unlikely the then-Mercedes Formula E driver would make an IndyCar switch.
"That's a great example," Shank replies.
"We were just impressed and blown away by Nyck. We've tried different things to try to get with him at different programmes. It just hasn't quite worked out with what he's in, or what we're in at the time, when he's free and all this stuff."
Like De Vries, Sargeant could well find a home in sportscars, as options in series such as IndyCar and Formula E (where De Vries is racing) are waning.
Sargeant is not believed to be at the top of the list for any teams who have seats remaining in IndyCar, but that's mostly because almost all of the paid-driver seats are gone. The teams with seats left need a contribution to their financial sustainability generally, but also this year in particular because the mid-season introduction of the hybrid unit has driven up costs.
Also, despite the fact Sargeant is American, he developed in the European-based formulae (like Formula 3, pictured below) the F1 juniors grow up in too. He's never raced competitively on an oval, for example.
But he's good friends with Andretti's Kyle Kirkwood and will have picked up plenty about the series.
And he is easily talented enough to come in and at least stand a chance at running at the sharp end in IndyCar. Even if the F1 journey has damaged his reputation.
He was nine places ahead of Armstrong in their 2022 F2 season together and, while they were in different teams, Sargeant was basically a rookie (he'd contested three races at the end of 2021) and Armstrong was in his third year.
This test will give Sargeant a chance to impress Meyer Shank and other teams watching on, although currently, it's a one-car test so there won't be representative times unless someone else joins.
It will also give Meyer Shank the chance to get a second test in before the off-season, and get some data before heading into the winter months.
MSR is taking over the Acura-badged works Honda IMSA SportsCar Championship programme for next season, so drafting in Sargeant for the endurance rounds could be an option if he's still available by then.
The team will announce its full-time IMSA drivers after Petit Le Mans next month.
Meyer Shank's Ganassi switch
The Sargeant test will be crucial in helping get some laps on the board after Meyer Shank's technical tie-up with Ganassi is complete.
After five years with Andretti support, Meyer Shank will receive parts including dampers as well as data, driver debriefs and engineering staff from Ganassi now, which gives it access to the team that has won four of the last five IndyCar titles.
It will also study and replicate the way Ganassi builds its cars and adapt those procedures. Combining all of these things allows Meyer Shank to use the data collected from tests and race weekends and have a proper relative comparison, either in real time or looking at it post-event.
The benefit is its cars act as a fourth and fifth Ganassi car on track, while Meyer Shank also does a lot of its own development with its personnel, so it hopes to be "additive" to what Ganassi is doing.
Ganassi - down from five cars to three for 2025 - gets a strong affiliate team that won the Indianapolis 500 in 2021 and was a pole-sitter in the series this year, and will know it's using an almost identical package. It should be a win-win.
This is the first technical package of its kind for Ganassi which, owing to its downsizing by two cars for IndyCar next season, and no longer running the Cadillac IMSA programme, has started a two-car Indy NXT programme and sent Shank key staff as part of its tie-up. It has also let some staff go - staff who will be quickly gobbled up by other teams strangled by the lack of elite personnel to go around in the paddock.
Meyer Shank will get on track with Helio Castroneves at Indianapolis next month, marking the first time the MSR-Ganassi partnership will run together. And Ganassi has tested Felipe Drugovich on September 30, and will run an Indy NXT driver before the end of the year, giving MSR more data to work with entering the off-season.
Felipe Drugovich is #INDYCAR testing at @BarberMotorPark 👀🏎️⁰⁰(🎥: felipedrugovich/IG) pic.twitter.com/7ba2B92nC3
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) September 30, 2024
Even if Sargeant is just getting up to speed at Thermal, he'll likely be running through crucial performance items to help the team get a read on its new equipment.
It made a huge step forward this year - a 25-30% gain according to Shank - after a nightmare 2023 where the team lost Simon Pagenaud to injury halfway through the campaign and only scored one top 10 in the entirety of that year.
This season it had a pole, a podium (in the non-points Thermal race) and eight top-10 finishes, with Rosenqvist 12th in the championship.
Now it has access to multiple-time champions Alex Palou and Scott Dixon - "one of the reasons we did the whole deal", Shank adds - and has a big chance to take another leap forward.
New signing's potential
Of course, Armstrong should help shorten that learning process after two years with Ganassi before joining MSR. His engineer for 2024, Angela Ashmore, is one of those staffers making that Ganassi-to-MSR switch, too.
The circumstances of Armstrong's move have led some to suggest Armstrong has been placed at Meyer Shank by Ganassi, but Shank insists "that's just not the case, I'm just telling you".
He says signing Armstrong - the 2023 rookie of the year - was about "trying to find the right blend of experience, youth and potential" and praised the 24-year-old's efforts as an ovals rookie in 2024 while pointing to some ill-fortune that cost him key results.
"I think he's on the correct trajectory to be where we want him to be, which is solidly in the top 10," Shank adds.
"If we get it right, threatening top five consistently. He has that potential."
Rosenqvist's redemption
Rosenqvist's 12th in the championship doesn't tell the whole story as a string of reliability issues this year, either on Shank's side or Honda's, hurt his results.
"We had five times this year that we had problems with the car that had nothing to do with him," says Shank.
"If you put those five good points-paying positions back, you're looking at a guy that finished sixth, seventh or eighth in the championship. That would have been tremendous from where we were last year."
Rosenqvist signed for the team for 2024 after three tough years at McLaren, which he'd joined from Ganassi in anticipation of being a team leader and helping turn McLaren into a championship-winning outfit.
He'd said the same thing joining Shank: that he wanted to be a team leader and be part of turning this team around. He appears to have ticked both boxes this year and it felt like he made far fewer errors than in years gone by.
"Even when the day didn't go well and he had zero - and, I mean, nothing - to do with it, he never changed," Shank says.
"He didn't turn on anybody. He didn't throw anyone under the bus. He just said, 'We're doing this together', and this is at repeated times that we had mechanical stuff go wrong. He never wavered from his position.
"I've got to give him a lot of credit for that, just being very, very chill and understanding and yet pushing to try to be better."
A relatively late decision from Rosenqvist to leave Ganassi at the end of 2020 didn't go down well with those at that team, but a lot of time has passed since then and it's hard to imagine anyone being able to hold a grudge for that long against someone as nice as Rosenqvist.
Rosenqvist's rebound, new signing Armstrong, and the new link-up with Ganassi make Meyer Shank easily one of the most interesting teams to keep an eye on heading into 2025.
Testing a 2024 F1 driver is just the icing on the cake.
