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The challenge of chasing an F1 seat as an American

The imminent arrival of a new American Formula 1 team is the source of significant excitement, but it also brings into perspective one of the major hurdles facing the most prominent aspect of any team.

As Cadillac prepares to enter in 2026, a lot of attention has been on the driver line-up, and the potential for an American to secure one of the seats. But as Colton Herta’s hopes of securing a Super License remain slim, and Kyle Kirkwood also remains a long shot as he needs an IndyCar championship win, perhaps the most likely addition with a U.S. passport is to be found in the European ranks.

Jak Crawford has been linked with Cadillac but is currently part of the Aston Martin setup, as he chases this year’s Formula 2 championship. He was just 14 when he was signed to the Red Bull junior program and made the switch to Europe in early 2020, a decision that was taken in partnership with his father, Tim, and was seen as a necessary step to chase an F1 seat.

But it was just the first of many steps along a tough-to-navigate path to even get into a position where Crawford is spoken about as a potential future F1 driver.

“I think that the Americans have a lot of really great options in the States, and they love living in their country,” Tim says. “I think it’s less risky to stay in the States if you’re a racer. To a certain degree, I feel the deck is stacked against you a little bit.

“The entire world of F1 is kind of based in the UK and, to a lesser extent, Europe. Heck, if [Arvid] Lindblad makes it to F1 next year, that would be six UK drivers. Nearly all the media is based in the UK, almost all the teams, so it’s just harder.

“The infrastructure is not set up for the Americans to succeed. You don’t know what relationships to form, things like that. So it’s just really hard to start from scratch.”

Getting support from an F1 team is the obvious route to help make the move to Europe, and the Crawfords did so at the first opportunity. But simply getting a chance as part of a junior program does not guarantee success.

“On our case, it was a little bit of a double-edged sword with Red Bull because they brought Jak to Europe,” Tim adds. “I won’t say it’s a regret, but it’s certainly one of the things that I signed the first contract that was put in front of us…

“But we found our way to Europe, and we probably would have with or without Helmut Marko, but it certainly made it a lot simpler at the start. Everything was kind of mapped out for us. And then it allowed us later to build up our support system.

“I think five years later on from that, we’ve got it all figured out. But we wouldn’t have had it figured out five years ago.”

After a strong early spell on the junior ladder, Crawford’s momentum stalled a little with seventh place in his second season of Formula 3 when racing for Prema. It was a year in which the three Prema drivers – Crawford, Oliver Bearman, and Arthur Leclerc – had just one win apiece and failed to take a pole position between them.

Crawford raced alongside highly-rated F1 rookie Isack Hadjar when he was a part of the Red Bull Junior Team. Dutch Photo Agency/Red Bull Content Pool

After that frustrating year, he still stepped up to F2 the following season and marginally beat his older teammate Isack Hadjar – who is now showing his class in F1 at Racing Bulls – in 2023, but he felt leaving the program after that season actually opened up a different development path for him.

“I remember, after my F3 year, it was kind of a reality check,” Jak says. “I knew I was under pressure. I knew I needed to work a bit harder. Then, my first year in F2, it was actually, I think from myself, quite a good season. I beat my team-mate, Hadjar, that year, and I think I performed very well.

“The car was not good, and then, right when I think I’m going to stay on, then I get dropped.

“When I got told the news, I wasn’t surprised, let’s say, just based off my previous year. So it didn’t really affect me, I was able to just basically keep up that workflow. I’d already started that year, on my own, so I was able to bring in people around me that could help.”

Released from Red Bull at the age of just 18, Crawford feels he was starting from scratch compared to some of his peers, given the lack of a support network around him at the time. It was an approach from Marko that can harden drivers and has seen many impressive talents reach F1, but it didn’t quite fit with what the Crawfords felt they needed.

“We didn’t have any control over the teams he was placed on,” Tim explains. “Helmut didn’t like us having a team of people around Jak. He’s really old school, and he felt like Jak didn’t need any of it. Didn’t need a physio, didn’t need a manager, didn’t need a performance coach, didn’t need any help at all.

“I remember one time he got mad at me because Nicky was on an email about travel logistics and he got mad at me: ‘Who’s Nicky? We don’t need all these people.’ And Nicky is Jak’s mom.

“After I watched firsthand how organized Ollie Bearman’s program was – not only his people, but also his interactions with Ferrari. That year we were teammates with Ollie, Ferrari were there at every event, helping Ollie, helping Arthur in a major way, every single race.

“Not a single person from Red Bull had any support for Jak. So at that point, I knew that it was going to be really hard to make it with Red Bull based on that scenario.”

Ahead of 2024, Crawford secured a seat with DAMS to remain in F2, but also started to build up more of a team around him. His performances alongside Hadjar had given him confidence he could perform in the right environment, but that environment includes outside of the race team, with a trainer and help on the sports psychology side.

At that point, there wasn’t a manager in place, but alongside his father the pair felt it was a good time for a reset in Crawford’s career.

“It didn’t happen all at once,” Tim says. “But we wanted to do something unconventional for a second year F2 driver, which is completely rebuild from scratch. And we wanted a “do-over”, since he was only 17 years old when he started F2.

“He really got thrown in at a really young age. When he was 17, he was racing against guys that were 21 or more, in some cases. So we started to look around for a driver development deal. But we also said, ‘OK, no F1 team for one whole year. Let’s just take a break, see what happens.’

“And then we got a really good deal thrown in front of us where it was kind of all that we wanted. And we had to make a decision and we all decided that we were just going to go for it.

“Even if there wasn’t a clear path forward for a seat with [Aston Martin], what they were offering from a driver development standpoint was worth it.

“I’ll just say that everyone is on a different path to F1. There’s some that are a little more conventional than others. But our path is maybe not one that we would chose, but it chose us.”

Crawford has been getting F1 seat time with Aston Martin. Clive Mason/Getty Images

With Crawford actually being recommended to Aston Martin via a Red Bull employee, he was offered a driver development role that the 20-year-old says has given him the space to learn and improve on multiple fronts.

“I think joining Aston Martin was a great part of [being able to focus on development],” Jak says. “No result expectation, it’s just about learning.

“I already knew what I could do as a driver. So, the result part, I didn’t need to try really hard to do that anyways. It was just about learning and developing and trying to find every kind of little place I can improve slightly in all areas – whether it’s on track, off track, in the sim, anything you can think of trying to improve on that.”

With Marko having been pushing for Crawford to bounce through the junior formulae one season after another, the more patient approach that was being craved has been the result. Not that the Crawfords expected to find an F1 team willing to offer the same levels of testing and preparation as Kimi Antonelli at Mercedes, but the speed in which Logan Sargeant was fast-tracked to F1 was seen as a cautionary tale.

Adding Harry Soden, the manager who had experienced Sargeant’s rapid rise – partly due to an apparent race between Williams and Red Bull to get an American into F1 first – to Crawford’s team was therefore another move made to strengthen his set-up.

“We interviewed quite a few other managers,” Tim explains. “And I remember that, Jak was really adamant that he liked Harry. And then the thing I really liked about Harry was that he had worked with Logan and he was really determined to have an American success story this time around.

“He kind of knew all the things that had gone wrong with Logan’s experiences. And since we’ve had a year and a half with Harry, he’s really made a big imprint on helping us build the team around Jak – that team that we really never had from the beginning.”

As Crawford chases an F2 title and gets F1 seat time with Aston Martin, all amid interest from Cadillac, Soden now faces the positive challenge of trying to work out his next best move. A top five in the standings this year – for the second season in a row – will secure the Super License that could open all sorts of doors.

Five years on from the first move to Europe and with a significant time at a highly-successful F1 team’s junior program having not worked out, it has hardly been a straightforward path to this point. But then no driver’s path is the same.