{"id":8462,"date":"2025-07-27T09:50:57","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T13:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/?p=8462"},"modified":"2025-08-03T09:52:54","modified_gmt":"2025-08-03T13:52:54","slug":"unlucky-spa-weekend-for-crawford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/27\/unlucky-spa-weekend-for-crawford\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlucky Spa weekend for Crawford"},"content":{"rendered":"

STAVELOT, Belgium (27 July 2025) \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The 20-year-old Texan made an impressive comeback from a Turn 1 incident to finish 11th\u00a0in Saturday\u2019s Sprint Race, but was unable to fight forward in the rainy Feature event as he came home 18th at the finish.<\/p>\n

Coming off three victories over the most recent five weekends \u2013 including Feature Race victories at Monaco and Austria \u2013 he is now ranked third in the standings with five weekends remaining, just nine points behind the leader.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a tough weekend in general,\u201d said the DAMS Lucas Oil driver. \u201cFrustrating, 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\u2019s unfortunate to come out with zero points.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPractice was pretty good, and it seemed pretty good for qualifying,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we just didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gridded 14th\u00a0for the Sprint Race, he went to the outside to make a pass in Turn 1 of the opening lap \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got in an incident in the first corner,\u201d Crawford explained. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy damage was quite bad, so I was not really fast,\u201d he said. \u201cWith 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s 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\u00a0following his mandatory pit stop on the 13th\u00a0lap. He gained a few places, but a late caution resulted in the race being red-flagged with two laps remaining.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe struggled to find a good balance today,\u201d he said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crawford returns to action this weekend, running in Round 10 at the Hungaroring in Budapest.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m ready to fight back this weekend, and I\u2019m looking forward to it. It will be a warm one, for sure,\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STAVELOT, Belgium (27 July 2025) \u2013 American Formula 1 prospect Jak Crawford had a tough weekend at Spa-Francorchamps that saw him leave the Belgian event without [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8463,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-jak-crawford-racing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8464,"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8462\/revisions\/8464"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sundaymanagement.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}