De Vries went the wrong way he wanted to improve the car first….. but he should ignore the bad car and tried to drive as fast possible. Lots of those improvements came after de Vries suggestions.

He wasn't one of those drivers who went fast first but he want to settle in a car which doesn't work in F1

Or adding a third car to the bottom 5 teams on the grid for more chances for data and strategy calls.

Might be right, might be wrong; we'll see.
I'm sure Williams have their reasons for it, and their decision making base is certainly different from what it was in the latter 'Claire stages', although I'm of the opinion that their position back then certainly wasn't Claire Wlilliams' fault alone, if any fault indeed and just the result of what she was given to work with in the first place.

Other than a seat taken, I don't know if it makes all that much of a difference. Unless he turns out to have become even worse instead of any better next year. In which case he'll be replaced anyway, but just a little later.
Might be that Vowles -and that would be rightly so- decided to focus on the biggest problems first, and not be distracted by dealing with too many issues at once, but I -nor you- have any way of telling.

Regarding the 'seat taken'; that's a bigger issue than one to blame on just a single team. The same applies to Aston Martin, for example, and other teams too, even though, possibly, to a lesser extent.
In a way, Perez' peformance for example, is way worse than Sargeant's, given the tools and experience available to work with.

Sargeant has been awful beyond belief. Nothing to praise here. Only Mazepin was worse in the last 15+ years. Both somehow finished 21st in a 20-driver championship

I feel sorry for de Vries though. I'm sure he's still scratching his head sometimes, with this news being one of those moments.

I was wondering about this.
Is it really the first time that this has happened? I've been following F1 since the 60s and I can't think of another occasion, but thought that might just be my fading memory!

Thanks, as said I didn't follow it and saw a whole bunch of negative comments after the finale and, over the season, not much in the way of viral moments.

It's always been tough to get into F1, but these days teams pace such a huge premium on experience that potential rookies are in an especially tough spot.

@shakenbake If Williams were truly interested in Drugovich, they would've offered him a drive after shortly after his F2 champioship rather than long after with all recency freshness gone.
Ultimately, no team was seemingly interested to hire him as a full-time driver, probably because of how long winning that champioship took for him.
Besides, independent teams serving others is generally a past thing in F1, not to mention times have changed even at Williams under the current ownership, so fair enough that they prefer their academy drivers over serving other teams or manufacturers.
Btw, Sargeant isn't a so-called pay driver to my knowledge.

I thought Williams could have agreed a loan deal with Aston Martin for Drugovich. His F2 championship last year was a considerable feat, backed up by very impressive testing/practice times in the AMR23 this year..

If not put him in green overalls, you’d think AM would at least want to keep his race fitness/form in check and give him some starts in a fellow team they have at least some relations with via Mercedes. It also stops them from looking elsewhere like Piastri had to do under Alpine when he was left on the sidelines for too long.

Sargent must be bringing in some decent $$$ for him to retain that seat imho. He’s not done enough to secure it on talent alone in my eyes.

Yes, I don't see how he's any better than mick schumacher.

Do we really need to see more of Bottas, Ricciardo, Hülkenberg, or Pérez? They’ve each done over 200 races and with one exception have won a handful of races, but never really got anywhere near a championship campaign.

If you are trying to fill Formula One seats with drivers who are likely to have a succesful championship campaign in the future, then you'll probably end up with several empty seats. The teams with best performance and/or most money lure the best drivers and the other teams are left picking best available options. As long as the other teams make their decision based on (assumed) performance and not money, I wouldn't complain.

(Regarding Perez: Obviously there are several drivers who are better than Perez and wouldn't hesitate to join RB. However, I still think there are several worse drivers in Formula One than Perez, so he wouldn't be my first pick to leave the series altogether).

I'm pretty sure that even he himself had many doubts, as well as whoever decided to give him another contract.

I do follow F2 and I am always amused by the comments about the quality of the field (fill in the year) since there are so many factors and variables that can give a skewed image. I for one think there are some very promising drivers amongst the current field, notably Bearman, Doohan, maybe Hadjar and Iwasa. However you can have all the talent in the world, what is the point if there aren’t any opportunities to show it. So yes I do think as well it’s a shame some of the ‘older’ generation keeps seats occupied while their careers are in a deadlock. At least at team like Haas and Sauber could have filled the seats with some new talent (I know Haas won’t) - Drugovich definitely deserves his chance.

At least he's performed decently well.

Zhou is the one I wonder about. He must come with a lot of $

Do we really need to see more of Bottas, Ricciardo, Hülkenberg, or Pérez? They've each done over 200 races and with one exception have won a handful of races, but never really got anywhere near a championship campaign. Even further down the list, there's guys like Magnussen, Stroll, Ocon and Gasly who are all around that 150 races mark.

Apparently the F2 field has not that impressive this year (I didn't follow it), and other ways of getting license points (Indycar and the WEC) don't really have any drivers that are either interested in F1, or haven't already been there.

It seems the anti-Verstappen license point system is cutting off the supply of new entrants. Maybe, and especially in light of Verstappen's success, a simple age-requirement would have been sufficient.