As F1 blossoms in the USA, it's missing one component

Miami hosts round six of the 2025 season this weekend, but there are no American drivers on the grid.

- Kieran Jackson

The sorry sight of Floridian youngster Logan Sargeant trudging away from his burning Williams car last summer at the Dutch Grand Prix represented his final failed foray in Formula One.

Quickly axed by team principal James Vowles, Sargeant lost his F1 seat after 36 races and one point. In doing so, a rare US presence among the 20-driver grid was no more.

Since Mario Andretti won the 1978 Dutch Grand Prix – the same year he claimed his sole F1 world championship, America’s only title to this day – no US driver has won a race. In fact, in the 47 years since, only Eddie Cheever in the 1980s has recorded more than one podium. Sargeant’s only point, awarded post-race in Austin in 2023, was America’s first point in the drivers’ standings since Mario’s son, Michael, finished third in Monza in 1994.

A puzzling record, you may think, for a sport which has in the last decade boomed almost unfathomably across the Atlantic. Miami, which debuted in 2022 a year ahead of the Las Vegas night race, hosts its fourth edition this weekend with its typical high-octane offering of sunshine, showbiz and style.

With A-listers expected in their dozens, it will host the biggest Florida party of the weekend. Donald Trump even turned up last year, a so-called “lucky charm” in the McLaren garage ahead of Lando Norris’s first F1 victory. But the track built around the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens will not host an American driver.

It is the striking anomaly of F1’s impressive US boom. And the horizon is not propitious.