It’s an increasingly common conversation among racing fans in the United States who want to see success in Formula 1. The talent pool is clearly there, so why are there not more drivers in the frame for F1 seats?
Logan Sargeant has become the first full-time American on the grid in over 15 years, and at a time when immensely skilled young drivers are shining in what appears to be an ever-strengthening IndyCar field, it feels like there should be a conveyor belt queuing up to join him in F1. Instead, there are three in Formula 2, but none are banging the door down quite yet.
While Ecuador can also lay claim to Juan Manuel Correa and both Guatemala and Spain the same for Brad Benavides, the youngest of the trio and best-placed is Jak Crawford. At just 17 and Red Bull-backed, he’s got time on his side, an F1 team’s support and – like Correa – a podium to his name.
But his story is perhaps a good example of why it’s taken so long to reach the point of fans having an American F1 driver to get behind, and why the three currently chasing the dream in F2 – and all of those who may follow – deserve the utmost respect.
Crawford was hotel-hopping around Italy at the age of 12 to start racing karts, before a growth spurt – hardly unusual for a kid entering his teens, but also not something you can predict – made that path appear too challenging and a move into Formula 4 cars in Mexico followed after he turned 13.
That wasn’t exactly a stable period, as he was still racing karts alongside a stint in USF2000, but then it all changed very quickly in October of 2019, when he was still just 14 years old.
“My dad received an email or a phone call from Dr. (Helmut) Marko saying that he wanted to meet us in Mexico City,” Crawford recalls to RACER. “This was back in in 2019. We were in Houston. So of course we are close to Mexico City – only an hour flight. So they were there for the grand prix, of course, and me and my dad got the flight and met Dr. Marko that night.
“That was my my first interaction with him. I had a 15-20 minute chat with him, which went well, and that was when he said he wanted to see me on track. So within a week, he sent me to the Milton Keynes headquarters to go in the simulator. And then I went to Van Amersfoort Racing (in the Netherlands) for time in their simulator as well.
“All was good on the simulator, and then I went to a two-day test at the Red Bull Ring. There were some other Red Bull Junior drivers there, there was Johnny Edgar there, and Harry Thompson, who was a part of Red Bull at the time, so I was sort of up against them.
“At the Red Bull Ring, I remember it was very, very cold, very wet for half of the day – it was really tough to get any sort of tire temperature or anything. But at the end of the first day, he had already offered me a contract and said he was impressed by my simulator work and my first day and that was it. It was done on the first day.
“So that was that was really nice. That was a moment I think I’ll remember forever.”
There had already been a training camp with the Ferrari Driver Academy that had amounted to nothing, at which point Crawford felt the F1 dream had disappeared. But in the space of three weeks he’d gone from having first contact with Marko to signing a contract that would put him on course for a full season of Formula 4 in Europe.
It’s a dream to many, but it came at an often-overlooked price when you think about what many other young teens would normally be doing at Crawford’s age.
“I miss my family, of course,” he says. “I had to leave school quite early at 12 years old, then I started doing homeschooling or online school on my own. So I think I miss, you know, the bit of the childhood of growing up as a teenager and the high school part of it, which is tough. It was something that I wanted – I’m a very social person, especially with my friends.