Jak Crawford Is the Only American Driver in F1: He Knows It’s Rare

Jak Crawford is currently the U.S.’ sole driver in the biggest motorsport competition in the world, though you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

The Texas native has acquired that classic Formula One twang. It’s the product of years spent racing around the globe, including vast amounts of time in Europe — a blended, nonspecific accent not dissimilar to the cadence of other talented teenagers who grew up on international race tracks, like Britain’s Lando Norris and Ollie Bearman.

Having risen the ranks from F4 all the way to F2 — a championship he narrowly lost last year to Italy’s Leonardo Fornaroli — Crawford, just 21, entered this season with an almost unprecedented amount of experience under his (seat)belt.

After that no-doubt gutwrenching F2 loss, Aston Martin was on hand to soften the blow. They made Crawford their reserve driver for the jewel in the FIA crown (and the one contest these kids put their lives on the line for): F1. His job? To score Lawrence Stroll’s prized racing team crucial points in the event of Fernando Alonso or Lance Stroll being unable to drive.

“It’s a pretty rare thing, I think,” Crawford tells The Hollywood Reporter about being an American F1 driver. He’s speaking from Aston Martin’s lavish team yacht, docked in Monaco. We’re a guest of the team here in the municipality for the most glamorous race on the F1 calendar, the only sporting event on the planet where A-listers (such as, this year, Cynthia Erivo, Patrick Dempsey, Noah Schnapp, Terry Crews, Olivia Wilde, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas) come second to the spectacle. The conversation is regularly — and politely — interrupted by uniformed staff offering us a selection of extravagant canapés, as the Côte d’Azur sun beats down on a busy harbour teeming with billionaire boats.

“Me and Logan Sargeant are really the only ones who have been close since Scott Speed was on the grid,” continues Crawford, referencing the former Scuderia Toro Rosso driver, whose last F1 appearance was in 2007. “So yeah, it’s been a while. But I’m super proud to represent my country — not only in Formula One but in Formula Two over the last couple of years. Being an American, there’s actually so many young U.S. kids that drive go-karts and I think almost look up to me, in a way. I feel like I didn’t have that enough. There was no one from my country to support anyone in F1.”

The rarity of Crawford’s position is only more impressive when you consider how American the sport has become over the last decade. In 2017, the Formula One Group was bought by the Colorado-based Liberty Media for an eye-watering $4.4 billion.

Fast forward nine years, and there are now three U.S. races on the calendar, in Las Vegas, Miami and Austin — more than any other country — and, according to F1, the sport now boasts 52 million fans across America, up 11 percent year-on-year. “I have so many friends, especially my age, [who] had no idea what I did or what I wanted to do growing up,” Crawford says. “And now they know all about it and come to my races.”

He concedes that much of this is down to the Netflix doc Drive to Survive — the success of which hundreds of Hollywood producers have tried, and failed, to recreate — though even Crawford is stunned by the glitzy names that have joined us here in Monte Carlo. “I saw Kim Kardashian,” he tells THR. (The reality behemoth and Skims founder is in the paddock supporting Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton.) “I’ve seen a lot of security guards. I’ve just been pushed out of the way!” he laughs. “It’s been super strict all weekend.”

Kardashian is not a woman who needs explaining to anyone. But Crawford, admittedly, has never heard of The Hollywood Reporter. Perhaps our being here is a testament to F1’s rising celebrity-ness, or maybe, more simply, a race car driver like Crawford can’t get excited about film and TV news. The latter is more likely, given his interest in padel (a mix of tennis and squash) and running, as well as a preference for the more lowkey F1 events: “I like Monaco more for the track and the racing, but yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily my vibe,” he says. “I like quieter races, but it’s still super cool, of course.”

It makes sense — Crawford has already notched up over 2,000 kilometres (1,242 miles) in F1 machinery, but he’s desperate to get as much time in the car as possible. “I’m ready to drive at any point,” he says about potentially stepping in for Alonso or Stroll. “I feel ready, and of course, I don’t wish anything bad on anyone, but if the opportunity [were] to arise, I would definitely take the opportunity to try and show my best.”

The step-up from F2 to F1 is, as Crawford describes it, the biggest any driver will do in their career. “The cars, of course, are faster — you have more downforce, more power. But I think the biggest thing is more the technology,” he says. “And the amount of people you work with. We have so many people, probably near 1,000 people, that work for the team. In Formula Two, we had 12,” he smiles. “So it’s a huge difference.” It’s a discrepancy that has even necessitated Crawford change up his gym routine to compensate for the immense muscle needed in the neck and body to handle the force of driving an F1 car.

It’s also been something of an emotional whirlwind to all of a sudden be sharing the paddock with his childhood heroes. “Growing up, I always looked up to Max [Verstappen],” continues Crawford, “He was a young guy, really fast, and a lot of the time I relate to that because I was quite young when I started. Now he’s one of the best drivers in the world.”

Luckily, as competitive as these 22 drivers are, they’re “pretty nice” and “always say hello” to the young American. And racing under the U.S. flag, Jak Crawford is hoping that sometime — in the near future — one of them will be his teammate.