When Logan Sargeant and his brother, Dalton, were growing up in South Florida, racing go-karts and waking up early on weekends to watch Formula 1 grands prix beamed in from around the world, their sport of choice was lost on most of their peers.
“I don’t think any of the kids we went to school with really understood it,” Logan told me recently. “Honestly, until Netflix, they still didn’t get what it was.”
Sargeant—who this season has become the first full-time American F1 driver since the recent Netflix-driven spike in American interest in F1—recognizes that things have changed in his home country since a dozen years ago, when knowing the difference between Monza and Massa (one is an Italian race track, the other a Brazilian driver) was rarefied intelligence compared to knowing the starting five of the Big-Three Heat. “But to be honest, away from the races, it’s still not bad,” he said, referring to his lack of recognizability. He was right. Sargeant, 22 and on the verge of global sporting fame, was in April, in both New York and London, still perfectly cocooned in anonymity.
One overwhelming contributing factor is that Sargeant has spent the majority of his ascent in motorsport overseas. Like soccer players, suit tailors, and pasta makers, race-car drivers with elite ambitions still need to get to Europe if they’re serious about their craft. In the case of the Sargeant boys, the family moved to Lugano, Switzerland, when Logan was 12 and Dalton was 15. They attended the American School on weekdays, raced on weekends, and organized their lives around greater opportunities in racing.
What followed was a decade of ups and downs in the pressure cooker of European junior racing—multiple inflection points when Logan looked like he could be that rarest thing, the second coming of Andretti and a true future global sensation, but just as many near career-ending roadblocks. Today, he is just the third American to race in F1 since Michael Andretti, in the 1993 season.
Logan Sargeant is a 22-year-old American male. He has blonde hair, light eyes, a square jaw, and the sort of glinting crooked grin that will prove a threat to safe-feeling boyfriends on the several continents where F1 runs. He’s not so active on social media. Posts what he needs to post for the team, for his career. Follows his fellow drivers, his friends, and models with names like Chloe and Kiley and Kya and Kiki. He likes fishing and being on boats, like any good son of Boca Raton. He stands about five-eleven. Wears Dolce & Gabbana shades when there’s sun in the sky. Skips around while working out between genres, from hip-hop to country, but always, always, finds his way back to Drake. His home base.
Logan comes in quiet, but with a palpable edge. You don’t get to F1 without feeling like you can go faster than any human you ever encounter. He gets his competitiveness from his mother, he said. His mental toughness from his dad. He recalled for me the pivotal meal when his father proposed the move: “I remember we were sitting in J. Alexander’s, and Dad asked us if we wanted to go race in Europe.” Logan was 12 and Dalton was 15. “I was always just going with the flow. For me it was just: Sure.”
While sitting in the living room of Mario Andretti last spring, I asked him about the prospect of a full-time American F1 driver in the near future, and he responded with a story that has stuck with me. About a decade ago, he said, he visited the Red Bull factory in England, and asked Red Bull team boss Christian Horner about some young American prospects: “And the rebuke I got was unbelievable,” Mario told me. “He said, ‘You know if you bring an American driver here, we’ll destroy him.’”
It was a pro forma response. For decades now, it has been an uphill battle for American drivers with F1 dreams. There’s the question of racecraft. But also of respect from the sport’s powers that be, the very people and teams who would ever grant such an opportunity. Michael Andretti once described for me the trials and tribulations of his 1993 season, when he was racing for Ferrari, but flying back and forth to his home in the US on the Concorde, rather than relocating to Italy to live closer to the factory. The resentment, he said, was overwhelming. There was always just this feeling, he said, that the European racing establishment didn’t trust someone from America who didn’t play all the way by their rules.
But could an American driver overcome the biases by committing to their system and winning on their soil? When Logan left Florida for Europe after elementary school, he made that commitment all the way—and hasn’t really been back to the US to race since. Sure, he’ll mess around in go-karts at home. Like when he and Dalton went out to the parking lot of the Homestead-Miami Speedway this past Christmas and got more banged up than he’s ever been in F1. (“Cracked my ribs,” he said. “They’re only just feeling a hundred percent and that was months ago.”) But this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix will be the first time he’s raced in an actual car in America. What can he say? He’s been living over there for almost half his life. “Yeah, it’s been a little bit.”
In Richmond, a leafy village in south-west London, Logan was mid-workout when he started peppering his trainer, Ben Jacobs, with questions about the different subgenres of rock’n’roll. Jacobs, a former professional rugby player from Australia, is 40, and a sort of wise uncle who knows things like the different subgenres of rock’n’roll. Jacobs is used to this kind of inquisition. “We’re together on the road twenty-three weeks now,” he said, meaning every race. Plus most days they’re here. After retiring from rugby, Jacobs moved to London with his wife, who opened up a pilates studio that was popular among lower-tier race-car drivers (plus the guy who plays Roy Kent on Ted Lasso). The drivers would come in for the pilates and end up with Jacobs as a trainer. Sargeant, who’s lived—or at least maintained his home base—in London for the last seven years, is Jacobs’ first driver to make it all the way to F1.
The two typically meet at a gym in Richmond or at a padel court in Chiswick, where they blend weight training, agility, cross-training in hand-eye coordination. To a casual observer, Sargeant’s workout looks like the workout of any athlete, except for when they break out the weighted helmet. A standard F1 helmet weighs about 3 pounds. This one is 8 kilos, or 17 pounds. Logan wears it to do sit-ups, lifts, core work, neck-strength exercises. The enormously wide and powerful neck helps explain why F1 drivers’ heads don’t detach from their bodies in high-speed corners. It also helps explain why so many drivers resemble lego men, with a pair of straight lines from their temples to their shoulders, clipped right on.
He is a professional athlete, one of the rarest beings on earth who sit at the top of the global sports pyramid. But 22-year-olds these days are even younger than they were last year and the year before that. He was born in 2000. He likes the Heat but knows only of triumph. He likes the Dolphins but knows only of failure. He knows golf as much through the new Netflix show as anything else. Same for tennis. He hasn’t heard of Agassi—but, remember, Agassi stopped playing practically before Logan could even read. These doc series are shaping the complete knowledge base of a whole new kind of fan. Just as they did for so many Americans with Formula 1. But despite his interest in the up-close look at those other sports, “I don’t even watch Drive to Survive, man,” he confessed, smiling a little guiltily.
His emerging presence in F1 was teased at the end of last season. The producers weren’t focused on Sargeant because he was still a long shot to be elevated into one of the seats. There is no automatic churn in F1, no relegation. The same 20 drivers can technically remain in their seats year after year. But when four-time World Drivers’ Champion Sebastian Vettel announced his retirement last year, it kicked off a game of musical chairs that ultimately resulted in three rookies moving onto the grid. The first seat went to Nyck De Vries, a Dutch 28-year-old who all but cemented his spot with an epic result while sitting in for a sick driver at the Italian Grand Prix in September. The second to former F2 and F3 champion, Australian Oscar Piastri. But the final spot was still an open question late in the season.
In order to reach F1, you need to, of course, be selected by a team. But a driver also needs to clear a qualification threshold measured in what are called super-license points. Without getting bogged down in the how or the why, Sargeant was short super-license points when Williams, last season’s last-place team, tapped him for the final remaining seat in November. He’d driven well all year, but needed to finish eighth or higher in the final F2 race of the season in Abu Dhabi to secure his points. “There was a bit more pressure going into that weekend,” he said. “But the defining moment is once you tighten your belt, and you’re locked in.” He finished fifth. And ascended just like that to the pinnacle of racing.
But in April, both New York and in London, it was clear that there was a lag to the total transformation of his life. It wasn’t like starring in a blockbuster movie or dropping a chart-topping record. There was a more gradual onset of awareness. Many of the reasons for this are practical: While drivers like Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton make upwards of $50 million a year from racing contracts and endorsements, it is believed that Sargeant is paid less than $1 million. Like a rookie contract in the NFL, you spend at least your first season living more like your fans than your best-paid peers. He rents a modest apartment in Earl’s Court. He drives around London in a Vauxhall Astra—a little matchbox of a compact commuter car. I rode from one borough to another with him in the back of not a black car but an UberX. Even when he travels for races, he flies business class on commercial flights. (Whereas Verstappen takes his own PJ.) When I asked him about what had surprised him most about the early part of the season, he said, “I don’t really like that word. Surprise. Because you’re expecting the hardest challenge you can imagine. I wouldn’t say it’s a surprise, it’s just difficult.” I asked about the non-competitive elements, the fans, the media. “It’s a bit overwhelming, to be honest. Sometimes you don’t feel like you get any time to yourself to sit back and take a breath. I mean, on Thursday in F2 and F3, all you do is prep. And now all of sudden you have an hour to prep and the rest is media. Everything shrinks in terms of the time you have to prepare yourself.”
In New York, he was just off a flight from Melbourne, where he’d crashed out of the Australian Grand Prix a couple days earlier—a couple days he’d spent on airplanes. He was filled with bright-eyed ebullience until the jet lag came on at lunch and he nearly face-planted into his brick chicken. Despite not having criss-crossed oceans in F3 or F2, which are primarily contained to Europe, he was getting better at dealing with it. His advice for jet lag? Take a little melatonin when it’s midnight at your destination. And artificially replicate the light of wherever you’re going. If it’s day there, stick your iPad in your face and keep yourself awake. If it’s night, black out, mask up, sleep. After the stopover in New York, he flew back to London, his first circumnavigation of the globe. Later, he summed up the experience for me in perfectly understated racing terms: “I completed the lap.”
In the upper echelons of formula racing, an elite and expensive hobby if ever there was one, young racers tend to come in three flavors. First: the children of former professional racers. (On the 2023 F1 grid, we have Verstappen, Carlos Sainz Jr., and Kevin Magnussen.) Second: drivers whose regular-joe families and communities sacrifice everything to prop them up in the junior ranks. (Most notably among the current crop is seven-time World Champion Hamilton.) And, finally, there are the children of the ultra-wealthy, who work their way into one of the precious 20 seats in Formula 1 by bringing funding with them. It’s sort of like suiting up in the NBA because your dad bought the team—or at least purchased the naming rights to the arena.
Sargeant doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories, but his uncle is a billionaire, and his ascent to the summit of international racing did begin with a rich-kid Christmas present. Neither parent ever raced cars, but Dad decided to get the boys go-karts one Christmas because Mom didn’t like the dirt bikes they were riding. “It was honestly just about finding a new thing to have fun with,” Logan said. Five-year-old Logan and eight-year-old Dalton started taking their go-karts out to the track at Homestead and Opa Locka, just a weekend thing at first. But they got hooked. And each steadily overtook the competition in Florida and the Southeast. Win after win. “And so it was: OK, now what do we do to make it harder?”
Logan finished up fifth grade in Florida while the family made their move to Switzerland. In addition to the racing opportunities, Dad had business there. (Dad’s company, it should be acknowledged, was taken to court a few years ago by the US Government for bribing officials in three South American countries to secure asphalt contracts. The company pleaded guilty and agreed to pay over $16 million in fines.) In Europe, Logan quickly began ascending through the ranks, traveling throughout mostly Italy to karting races on weekends. “I definitely felt like school was a lot more challenging than in Florida,” he recalled. “And we were missing a lot of school, for sure, but that’s part of it with racing. It is what it is.”
In 2015, when he was 15, Logan became the first American to win an FIA Karting World Championship, the top junior series, since Lake Speed, in 1978. As a result, he won a seat in a pair of Formula 4 racing series—first in the UAE, in 2016, then in the UK in 2017. Formula racing works like minor-league baseball, where there are many more players, teams, and geographically clustered divisions in Single-A ball than, say, Triple-A, which more or less mirrors the Majors. In 2019, Logan joined Formula 3, which moves across many of the same European countries and racetracks as F1. That season, he finished 19th of 34 drivers—hardly a sign of an undeniable future champion. But not so discouraging that he packed his bags and bid arrivederci.
Dalton, meanwhile, had returned home to the US, where just two racing paths exist for elite American racers. You either go the way of IndyCar, cousins to formula cars with their open-wheel design, or you ply your trade in stock cars, the crown jewel of which is NASCAR. Oval tracks. Left turns. Motorsport of the rubbin’-is-racin’ variety. Dalton went the NASCAR route, ground it out for a few years, then retired right as Logan was catching the break he needed. I asked Logan what the difference was between him and his brother. Why he made it to the top and his brother fell short. “He was really good. I think I got so lucky being younger,” Logan said. “We moved when he was about to start high school and I think that was hard for him to miss out on. And I think that swayed him to go home. I think he should’ve gone to IndyCar—I’m one hundred percent sure he would’ve made it. But because he tried NASCAR, it’s just completely different. Those decisions can be so pivotal. I could’ve easily gone a different way and never had a sense of making it to F1.”
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.”
Losing the F3 title, crashing out in that final race in 2020, Logan told me, might have been a blessing in disguise. If he had won, he wouldn’t have been able to race F3 again. (No former champions compete in a series they’ve won, until F1.) So he would’ve been barred from F3 and unable to pay for F2, rendering his future in Europe at an impasse. Instead, he was able to race F3 for a third straight season and build up the coffers to give F2 a shot in 2022. Last season, in F2, he finished fourth. But Sargeant had something that the three drivers above him did not: an American flag next to his name. There were now reasons beyond just his race results—about 330 million reasons, at last count—for F1 teams to give Logan a fresh look.
Since the pandemic, and the introduction of Drive to Survive on Netflix, American fan interest in Formula 1 has risen palpably. In the 2022 season, F1 added the Miami Grand Prix to the calendar to complement the 10-year-old Grand Prix in Austin (which had a sellout last year of 440,000 fans across the race weekend), while races broadcast in the US on ESPN have seen a doubling of average audience since Drive to Survive began, to about 1.2 million viewers per race. These are still meager numbers compared to the major sports in the US—an average regular-season NFL game sees over 16 million viewers—but the curve looked attractive to both the sport and its sponsors. (They added a third American race to the 2023 calendar, the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix in November. “I heard somebody bought the suite at Caesars Palace for $5 million,” Logan told me. “Whoever’s going there, they’re on it.”)
Whether Sargeant becomes America’s breakout star remains to be seen. There seems to be a ceiling for how much American sports fans will get invested in mere participation rather than domination. Despite being one of the world beaters of the 80s and 90s, Williams, Sargeant’s team, has finished last on the grid in four out of the last five seasons. Where a team finishes in the Constructors’ Championship determines its prize money and ultimately its budget for the following season, creating a virtuous cycle of the rich teams getting richer and the poor getting poorer. (Just one of the many ways that the excessive world of Formula 1 reflects society as it is.) As a driver for Williams, Sargeant is tied inextricably to the progress of its car, its engineers, its team performance. The Williams factory in Grove, England, is a modest looking office park compared to the HQs of other teams, like Red Bull’s NASA-esque facilities in Milton Keynes. But it is there that Sargeant devotes his every effort most days—and where he’s sensing real positive change. “It seems like it’s actually caught some traction in the right way,” he said recently. “Sometimes a lot of it is just talk. But now it feels real. It’s happening.”
A reasonable goal for Sargeant this season is to earn even one Championship point—that is, finish tenth or higher out of 20 drivers in a single race. That’s hardly the stuff of American Dream Team-style total annihilation. But Sargeant possesses a mature sense of patience, calm, and conviction that frankly reminds me of European athletes and fans, who, in soccer or tennis or golf, appreciate the value of relative success. “I’ve raced with so many of these guys before, so you know you can race against them,” he told me. “But the margins are so small now. You have to be perfect.” He will, naturally, become more famous at first in the markets that already love F1 and know him from his progress through the junior ranks. But what if something were to really change in the US? How would transformative popularity actually come to fruition? As with so many things here, it would probably happen on the back of a blockbuster movie.
The team working on what could be the first great film set in the world of Formula 1 is a trio worth betting on: Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton, and a guy named Brad Pitt. Sargeant happened to meet Pitt in Austin last year. At most Grands Prix, teams invite celebrities and other VIPs inside their operation for the weekend, affording access to the drivers. Sargeant, who was then a member of the Williams Academy, had been invited to Texas to do his ambassadorial duties for the American race, when Pitt stopped by the garage for an impromptu visit.
“I’ve never met someone with that much California vibes, to be honest. Instead of doing knuckles, he was like all side knuckles,” Sargeant told me, mimicking the move. “The team wanted me to sign a hat for him. But I was like, like, C’mon… He’s way too cool for that. I can’t sign a hat for Brad Pitt.”
This weekend in Miami, and this season as a whole, is a test of the weight that Logan Sargeant’s shoulders (and neck) can bear. There is dissonance for Sargeant. He’s not yet known here. There is a gap between the narrative that he will be the face of the sport here and the reality of being a modestly-paid rookie driver. In all likelihood, he and his team will perform only so well in Miami, even at this most critical stop, a home race if ever there was one. But maybe that encounter with Pitt last year was even more meaningful to Sargeant than he even realized. Maybe those side knuckles were a blessing of sorts, an off-loading of expectation, a transference. Maybe it was Pitt communicating to Sargeant that he needn’t carry the weight of the sport in America alone, because he, Brad Pitt, would help do it instead. At least for a little while. Hollywood could take the spotlight while Logan Sargeant found his feet, clocked his hours in his race car, and proved himself to be the glorious mid-pack F1 driver we all know he can be.
Back in London, he was sipping an oat latte in a deeply English café in the city he’d called quasi-home for the last seven years. He was filled with self-possession, but focused on the goal of getting just a little bit better every day. “I feel like it’s still being built, what I’m doing,” he told me—and, by proxy, the many American fans who are eagerly awaiting an up-close look at their countryman this week. “We’re still in the lab. Still building. Still brewing. We’ve got a long way to go. Just keep watching.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Tyrell Hampton
Grooming by Melissa DeZarte using Omorovicza
