The 2020 F3 season felt in many ways, for Logan, like his last best shot to keep moving up the pyramid. Then, in March, the pandemic closed in on Europe—and Logan and his father caught one of the last flights back from London to Florida before the lockdown. It was not such a bad thing to be living back at home, with his mind switched off racing. Florida loosened Covid restrictions faster than almost anywhere, permitting its residents to return to something like normal life sooner than most. Logan spent days with his parents and his brother and his childhood friends out on the boat, playing water sports, waiting and waiting, without fully knowing when it would ever come time to get back to racing.
The 2020 season was ultimately squeezed into an intense window of 18 races across 9 weekends that summer. If you or your car were struggling, there was no real time to work it out. If you were vibing, you could black out and wake up at the end of the nine-week stretch with many podiums, a wheelbarrow of championship points, and, as in Logan’s case, his first couple wins in formula racing. Before the last race of the shortened season at the Mugello circuit outside Florence, Logan had a chance to win the Drivers’ Championship of the 2020 F3 season, but crashed out on the first lap, finishing third in the season-long championship and handing the title to another would-be 2023 F1 rookie, the Australian Piastri. “In my opinion, I was the best driver during that period,” Logan said. “But then it all unraveled.”
Each season in racing ends with enormous blinking question marks. Will the team have me back? Do we have enough money to keep going? Is it worth it? Even if I’m good enough, will there ever be an open seat for me in F1 for which I’ll ever be reasonably considered? Some suggest a season of F4 costs a driver a few hundred thousand dollars to run. In F3, it’s closer to a million a year. And to make the jump to F2, you’re looking at over $2 million to fund a season on a competitive team. You can make those costs up through sponsorship deals, patrons, team arrangements. But at the end of 2020, the dollars just weren’t adding up for Logan. “At that point, I didn’t know where to go,” Logan told me. “We were sort of in the dark if anything would come up. We didn’t have any direction at all.”
“We’ve been searching—in a little bit of a ditch trying to find out what we can do,” Logan told RACER in February 2021. “Try and find something in sports cars or I’d even consider Indy Lights [the support series of IndyCar]—that’s a really cool option.” Here he was, just two years ago, mapping out his retreat from formula racing in Europe with the press. Openly musing about his prospects in the lower ranks of American racing. The article that featured those quotes put an even finer point on things: “Logan Sargeant will not step up to Formula 2 this season and is unlikely to remain on the FIA path to Formula 1.”
Daniel Riley
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