For the first time in four years, Jak Crawford enters a new racing season without the support of the Red Bull Junior Team. Speaking to Feeder Series, the 18-year-old American says being out of the programme has relieved the pressure on him. He also explains why he thinks he can win the 2024 F2 championship.

By Steven Walton

Jak Crawford joined the Red Bull Junior Team (RBJT) in 2020 when he was just 14 years old and hadn’t even begun racing in European single-seaters.

In the four years since, he’s moved through Formula 4, Euroformula Open, Formula 3 and up to Formula 2, where he raced for the first time in 2023 with Hitech GP. He was one of six drivers on the grid who were supported by Red Bull. In September last year, Crawford told the official Formula 2 website that signing for the RBJT was “the moment that changed my life the most over the past four years.”

Crawford is now no longer part of the RBJT. In November, just a fortnight before the 2023 F2 season finale in Abu Dhabi, his management, Sunday Management Group, confirmed he was parting ways with the junior academy. At the time, Sunday Management Group said in a press release that his career was moving too rapidly. They described his jump to Formula 3 in 2021 as premature and stated: “It could be argued that the debuts in both F3 and F2 each came one year too early.”

This month, Crawford told Feeder Series in an exclusive interview that leaving the RBJT has “definitely relieved a lot of the pressure,” stating,  “I’m not thinking of it as a bad thing to not be part of the Red Bull Junior Team.” 

Crawford, who is 18 years old and one of the youngest drivers in F2, said Red Bull was “very rushed” to push people into F1. “I think it’s quite important for me to gain experience and let me sort of finalise myself as a driver…. I think I’ve shown that I have potential, it’s just about putting it all together which I’ve yet to have done.”

‘A bit too young’

Crawford was only 17 when he made his F2 debut in 2023. He was the second-youngest driver in the field after Ollie Bearman, who is six days younger. Among the F2 drivers with confirmed seats for 2024, Crawford is still only the fourth youngest, behind Bearman, Pepe Martí and Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

When he first joined the Red Bull Junior Team in 2020, Crawford was just 14 and had spent his single seater career racing in the United States. In 2020, he headed to Europe and raced in ADAC F4 and Italian F4, finishing second and sixth in the respective series. In 2021, he ran a dual campaign in F3 and Euroformula Open. While he only got one podium in that year’s F3 championship with Hitech GP, he had much more success in Euroformula Open, finishing third in the standings despite missing two rounds.

In 2022, Crawford returned for a second year of F3 and he had a huge opportunity to shine with a switch to frontrunners Prema Racing. The team captured the teams’ title that year, but Crawford finished a distant seventh in the standings, below teammates Ollie Bearman and Arthur Leclerc, who finished third and sixth respectively.

“My second year [in F3] kind of felt like my first year,” Crawford said. “I thought I was a bit too young and inexperienced, and [I] was making a lot of mistakes and not reaching my full potential.”

Still, in 2023 he made the jump up to F2.

‘Pretty good’ rookie season

Crawford wasn’t a championship contender in his F2 rookie year. He finished 13th in the standings, scoring 57 points, which is two more than rookie teammate Isack Hadjar, who was also part of the RBJT (and is still a member).

Despite not being in with a shot at the title, Crawford still thrust himself into the F2 limelight at stages in 2023. In the third round of the year in Melbourne, he took his first-ever F2 points by finishing second in the sprint race. It was the first of five podiums he would score during the season. He also delivered his maiden win in the Austria sprint race. Starting from reverse grid pole, he drove confidently and kept a cool head even when he made an early mistake in damp conditions and lost the race lead. Later in the season, he bagged pole position during a chaotic qualifying in Zandvoort, which he then converted to a podium in the feature race.

Crawford said he would rate his 2023 year as “pretty good.” Referring to his five podiums, a win, and a pole, he said: “I think if you had told me that at the beginning of the year, I’d be pretty happy.” It’s worth noting that Crawford also looked more comfortable in F2 than some of the other drivers who beat him in F3 the year before. Isack Hadjar, Arthur Leclerc and Roman Staněk all scored more points than Crawford in the 2022 F3 season, but he beat all of them in 2023.

Crawford said he thought his Hitech team “maybe struggled a bit with the car” and the all-rookie driver line-up. “It was difficult not having someone with experience as a teammate,” he said. “But you know, I do think it was a decent year, even though we didn’t get the greatest spot in the championship.”

Hopes for 2024

Crawford has left Hitech GP and this year, he will race with DAMS, the long-running French team which won the F2 teams’ title in 2019 with Nicholas Latifi and Sérgio Sette Câmara. Crawford will be teammates with fellow American Juan Manuel Correa. Last year, DAMS finished fourth in the F2 Teams’ Championship in large part thanks to Ayumu Iwasa, who finished fourth in the drivers’ standings.

Crawford said he has everything he needs to win this year’s F2 championship. “I have the experience I think, I’ve started to put everything together a bit more, and I have [DAMS] behind me,” he said. “The team and I work very well together.” Crawford also said that in the second half of 2023, he felt he’d reached a point of knowing “how to make the most of my driving.”

F2 has a new car in 2024, but Crawford said his experience from last year will still matter. “[F2 is] so competitive, there’s so many good drivers, top teams, you learn so much just even being there,” he said. “I think as well with the tyres, which are staying – you know – generally the same, the tyres are the part that are attached to the ground, so it’s probably the most important bit to get right.” 

Crawford described F2’s tyres as “really sensitive” and said there were times when he’d be confused about what went wrong. “And you know in F2 we have [fewer] tools than in F1. We don’t get as much information, which definitely makes it a bit more challenging as well.”

Crawford said DAMS has already given him a lot of information that he didn’t know, especially with the tyres. He said he learned a lot while driving for DAMS in November’s post-season test in Abu Dhabi, where over three days he completed 272 laps, which is the equivalent of eight feature races. Asked about what he had learned, Crawford said: 

“You know in the qualifying runs, the warmup is the most important [part] … there was a lot of stuff around that.” He continued: “As well as in the long runs, [I was] learning to manage my tyres a bit better and learning to do good out laps and stuff like that … the things you already know but just improving on them a little bit.”

Crawford said he also needs to improve his qualifying in 2024. Aside from a pole in Zandvoort, his best result last season was seventh, which he achieved in Baku, Monaco and Monza. “I need to do better first of all of putting myself up there, I think that’s the main thing, and then once you’re up there the points come to you,” he said. Crawford pointed out that it was “very, very rare” in 2023 to see the eventual champion Théo Pourchaire qualify outside the top ten. In fact, he only did it once.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency / DAMS