17-year-old Texan promises ‘Best is yet to come’
SILVERSTONE, England (7 July 2022) – Jak Crawford battled through his third-consecutive weekend to finish both races in the points in his rookie FIA Formula 3 Championship season. The 17-year-old Red Bull Junior team driver from Texas took 10th in Saturday’s opening sprint race, and set the fastest lap of the race en route to placing sixth in Sunday’s feature race for PREMA Powerteam.
“The best is yet to come,” Crawford said. “Overall I am disappointed with the weekend because we had a lot of speed and didn’t quite get the results. But at the end of the day, we didn’t lose that many points.
One big improvement came in qualifying, where Crawford put in a solid final lap to place fifth. Still, he thought he could have done even better.
“We had good pace this weekend,” Crawford said. “In qualifying I just missed a bit on my lap. I don’t think we had the speed for pole but definitely top-three. Still, top 5-five is still a good result, and I’m happy with that.”
Starting eighth in the Saturday event, with the top 12 qualifiers inverted, Crawford lost and then regained a position on the opening lap and then ran eighth for much of the event. With his tires losing grip, he lost two positions over the final two laps but still managed to collect a championship point.
“I got a good start but got tire damage on the first lap with an incident with another driver,” he explained. “Carrying that tire damage through the race really hurt, especially at the end as it caused too much degradation and I didn’t have any tire left. So I was a bit unlucky there. Even though I only lost two positions at the end of the race I could maybe have gained some, as we were looking quite quick.”
Crawford had a strong start for the 22-lap Sunday feature, jumping out in fourth and making a bid for third on the opening lap before falling back to fifth as a spin ahead of him forced two cars off and brought out a safety car.
“It was a crazy first lap and then I struggled with pace a bit early on, the balance was not great.”
Shortly after the restart, Crawford went side-by-side with another driver, who bumped him off course on lap 8. The Texas recovered from the light contact to rejoin the race in eighth. He was not happy with the incident, but obliged as he was urged to keep calm by the team.
Crawford gained seventh on lap 10, and then managed to take sixth with three laps remaining – although 2.4-seconds back. He fought to close the gap to within one second, helped by running a 1:456.713-seconds last lap – giving him fastest lap of the race for the second time in three races.
“I was battling for fifth when I got hit and dropped back to eighth” he said. “After that it was recovery and I got back up to sixth after a Safety Car restart. Then the speed was quite good, and as the race went on the car got better for me. On the last lap I got fastest lap, which showed we had the pace. It was just a shame that we didn’t get to race at the front the whole race.”
The F3 competitors have a short turnaround before next weekend, when the campaign reaches the midway point with Round 5, the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg on July 7-9.
