Logan Sargeant will start the Japanese Grand Prix from the pit lane as Williams plans setup experiments as part of its car rebuild ahead of the race.
The American rookie crashed a the start of Q1 and heavily damaged his car, leaving Williams with a big repair job. While that work is mainly taking place on Sunday morning, Williams head of vehicle performance Dave Robson says the car should be ready in time and will be changed from the setup that started qualifying.
“Almost everything,” Robson said. “Spare chassis, spare power unit — a previously used one, so no additional penalty — spare gearbox — previous one — floor, rear wing, front wing…
“Not allowed to do very much overnight so it’s been sat there with covers on. We got the spare chassis out, did as much as we could for that. Team getting on with the build now.
“It’ll be tight but it’ll be fine, no problem … we’ll make a few changes to the car set-up wise, because we might as well, and have a little experiment from the pitlane.”
Robson says the chassis change is only due to minor damage, and that Williams is not too tight on spares at this stage despite a number of recent incidents for Sargeant.
“It probably wont affect next year too much because I think we have enough parts around us. It just becomes a bit of a logistical exercise — how many do we want to actually ship and have at the circuit? What do we send on to the next, or back to the UK? I don’t think there’s too much panic. We’ll need to get that chassis repaired which will consume a bit of time at the factory, but otherwise we’ve got enough bits around us to carry on.
“Just some damage to the sidepod, radiator inlet — nothing major or structural. It’ll probably take longer to get it back to the UK than actually repair it.”
