Jak Crawford’s main focus in 2025 has been on his F2 title challenge, but the American driver has also been setting his sights on a professional racing career, taking part in the Formula E rookie test in Berlin. Feeder Series spoke to the American about his current F2 season and future ambitions.

By Martin Lloyd

Despite a difficult start to the year, Crawford has placed himself firmly in the title hunt in his third F2 campaign. After 10 rounds, he sits second in the standings, 17 points behind championship leader Leonardo Fornaroli. 

“I’m pretty pleased to be where I am in the championship,” Crawford told Feeder Series at Silverstone, where he took his second feature race win of the season. “I felt like, after Bahrain, it was going to be a rough year. I was really down after Bahrain. Melbourne no points, Bahrain no points – I was really down after that, and since then it’s been good. I’ve been pretty happy with my results and my driving so far.”

In Melbourne, Crawford qualified third before suffering a mechanical failure in the sprint race. The feature race was called off because of torrential rain, with Crawford due to start second after original polesitter Gabriele Minì was penalised for impeding him.

At the next round in Bahrain, the DAMS driver qualified a lowly 14th and finished both races outside the points. Since then, he has secured top-six finishes in all but four races. Two of those came at Spa, where he finished 10th and 17th, but he bounced back a week later at the Hungaroring, securing a pair of third-place finishes just before the summer break.

“I hope it [Spa] is another bogey weekend where we forget about it, move on,” Crawford said in the post–sprint race press conference in Budapest. “The pace has been great this weekend, and it’s always good when you can come off the back of a really bad weekend and straight away [be] top three in qualifying and podium.”

Crawford lost ground to Fornaroli in Budapest, but his double podium minimised the loss to eight points, while he also overtook Richard Verschoor for second place in the standings. He is now hoping to use his performances this year and his strong fifth-place finish last year to stake a claim for a professional seat.

To that end, Crawford has completed F1 tests with Aston Martin, most recently driving the team’s 2023 car, the Aston Martin AMR23, at Zandvoort and Monza. 

He also signed with the Andretti Formula E squad as a reserve and development driver for the 2024–25 season and participated in two rookie tests with the team, fuelling speculation that he could be a candidate for a then-vacant Cadillac F1 berth. The American team have since signed F1 veterans Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas to their race seats.

“I’ve had some very, very busy weeks,” Crawford told Feeder Series at the Formula E round in Berlin in July. “The whole year I’ve always been running in the sim for Andretti in Formula E, but also with Aston Martin, doing stuff for them in their simulator and also trying to do simulator for F2 and also go to my F2 races, so it’s been fairly busy, but the preparation went well. 

“Obviously, I came off a double header in Austria and Silverstone, so I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. But luckily, I was able to get in the simulator on Wednesday before I flew out and do a full day of running and be able to prepare last minute. But I know the car, so I was able to do probably more than 200 laps to prepare for the test.” 

On the one-day rookie test the day after the race weekend, Crawford finished third in the morning session and sixth in the afternoon session. He beat out teammate and 2023 F2 runner-up Frederik Vesti in both sessions despite the Dane’s having experience of the rookie test after he ran with Mahindra in 2024.

Crawford was keen to emphasise the support that he had received from Andretti’s 2025 race drivers, Nico Müller and 2024 series champion Jake Dennis.

“It’s really nice to be around Jake and Nico,” he said. “They’re very nice and easy to talk to. They’re very open about it. I’m able to talk to them about the car and setup and also the driving stuff. 

“So it’s [good to be] gaining all this knowledge, whether it’s on the simulator days, being able to compare to Jake and Nico, or just travelling with them and talking to them after the debriefs and listening to all they have to say.”

Additional reporting by Hanne Scheepers

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency