Williams driver Logan Sargeant has apologised to Nyck de Vries for hitting the back of his car during the Australian Grand Prix.
On the first lap following a restart to finish the final two laps of the Australian Grand Prix race, the driver of the Williams rear-ended de Vries’ AlphaTauri to halt the race once again.
Several drivers on the track, such as Fernando Alonso, Carlos Sainz, Pierre Gasly, and Esteban Ocon, also suffered incidents in addition to the crash between the two young drivers.
“The last restart was pretty weird,” the Williams rookie driver said after the race. “I felt like I braked where I did on the previous two starts, but it just seemed like nothing was up to temperature, the brakes, the tyres.
“I hit the pedal and it was immediate, both fronts locked, and there was nothing I could do from there.
“Sorry to Nyck, I didn’t want to end the day like that – it was a tough enough day as it was.”
While the car was “in a good spot,” according to Sargeant, switching to the medium tyre made him struggle.
“I think when we were on the right tyre, which was the hard tyre, we actually had pretty good pace there,” he said.
“I felt like we were in a good place, the car was in a good spot… But we tried to restart from the first red flag on the mediums.
“It just wasn’t the tyre to be on a lot of graining, it fell away really quickly… That was really the end of our race, unfortunately, but I felt like once we got on the right tyre we were good.”
In response to Sargeant’s post-race apology, De Vries who is also a rookie this year, said: “It can happen… Everyone can make a mistake and a misjudgement, and it’s a racing incident.
“We’ll move on and hope for a better race next time.”
