Unlucky Spa weekend for Crawford

STAVELOT, Belgium (27 July 2025) – American Formula 1 prospect Jak Crawford had a tough weekend at Spa-Francorchamps that saw him leave the Belgian event without gaining championship points following Round 9 of the FIA Formula 2 Championship.

The 20-year-old Texan made an impressive comeback from a Turn 1 incident to finish 11th in Saturday’s Sprint Race, but was unable to fight forward in the rainy Feature event as he came home 18th at the finish.

Coming off three victories over the most recent five weekends – including Feature Race victories at Monaco and Austria – he is now ranked third in the standings with five weekends remaining, just nine points behind the leader.

“It was a tough weekend in general,” said the DAMS Lucas Oil driver. “Frustrating, because I felt this would have been a good track for us. I feel if we could do the weekend again, it would have gone much better. It’s unfortunate to come out with zero points.”

Crawford ran a competitive fifth with his final lap in Friday morning practice. He got up to fourth with three minutes remaining in qualifying but could not improve his speed on his final lap and placed 14th.

“Practice was pretty good, and it seemed pretty good for qualifying,” he said. “But we just didn’t get the right setup for qualifying, and we struggled a bit to find the pace. We just made the wrong changes and at the end, it hurt us.”

Gridded 14th for the Sprint Race, he went to the outside to make a pass in Turn 1 of the opening lap – just as a competitor made an inside move to make it three wide. Crawford was bumped off the track into the gravel trap. He managed to drive through the obstacle and rejoin the circuit via the runoff road, but the damage had been done.

“I got in an incident in the first corner,” Crawford explained. “There was just nowhere to go on my side, and it gave me a lot of damage for the rest of the race. We went in and changed my front wing, but we had damage for the rest of the race.”

Crawford continued in 20th. He was up to 15th on a restart with four laps remaining, and managed to get up to 11th when the final two laps ran behind the safety car due to an incident.

“My damage was quite bad, so I was not really fast,” he said. “With the safety car near the end, some people were on the soft [tires] and some people on the mediums, so I picked up some places by being in the right position.”

Sunday’s race began on a wet track which saw a rolling start. Rain began falling early in the event, turning into a torrential downpour over part of the circuit for the final 10 laps. Crawford fell to 22nd following his mandatory pit stop on the 13th lap. He gained a few places, but a late caution resulted in the race being red-flagged with two laps remaining.

“We struggled to find a good balance today,” he said. “We had some issues with the tires, and I seemed to struggle a lot more than the others. Overall, just not a lot of speed. It was difficult even to keep it on the track at one point. It was very difficult to drive because of the tires. In the end, we compromised our race in case of getting lucky with the yellows at the end.”

Crawford returns to action this weekend, running in Round 10 at the Hungaroring in Budapest.

“I’m ready to fight back this weekend, and I’m looking forward to it. It will be a warm one, for sure,”