Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd
Jak Crawford bounced back from a points-free Spa-Francorchamps round with two Formula 2 podiums at the Hungaroring, and a single qualifying lap proved key for his success.
The DAMS driver was third fastest, 0.173 seconds off pole, but thrilled by his laptime.
“This one feels really good,” he said after qualifying. “It feels better than the pole lap I did in Jeddah in terms of the lap it was and the performance not only last week but also through today, which was looking quite rough.
“I was down in I think 17th after the first run, and put absolutely everything together. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw I was second across the line. And then third when Leo [Fornaroli] went at the end.”
Crawford reckoned he could go no faster, calling it “one of the best laps I’ve done in F2” and admitting “we have some work to do on the car, but I don’t know what it is exactly”.
He felt DAMS had “missed the setup” at Spa, having been “good in practice” before changes took the car in “the wrong direction for qualifying”.
Crawford “placed my car in the right spot” to go from eighth to fifth on lap one of the Hungaroring sprint race, then patiently climbed to third.
“I definitely waking up didn’t think there was a podium on the cards,” Crawford told media including Formula Scout.
“I knew it was going to be the last five laps trying to find any opportunity I could. Saw the opportunity with the fighting between Arvid [Lindblad] and Victor [Martins]. Got past Victor, then had to save up everything until the last lap to pass Arvid with the DRS.”
Before reaching them, Crawford’s race “was fairly chill”. He “went once for fastest lap in the beginning” to “see how my pace was”, then “went right back into relaxing”.
“I felt no sense of urgency, then 10 laps to go it all kind of kicked off and I felt I had great pace. When you really fight hard here, the thermal limit of the tyre, you lose that. So when I started to fight Arvid I lost a bit of grip.”
Crawford felt Lindblad “was just swerving everywhere I went”, adding: “Once I saw he was defending really hard, I knew I was going have to wait until the end when he was really pushing to the limit of his tyres and I was catching him like three, four tenths in the last corner every time.”
Repeating third place in the feature race promoted Crawford to second in the championship, but didn’t meet his expectations.
“I felt I had really good pace [but] I had a really slow stop, which hurt me a lot,” he explained. “I came out losing two seconds or three seconds, so had to gain that gap again.
“Frustrated because I only had one [passing] opportunity, and it was a bit dirty on the inside, and had a small lock-up which put me a bit off-line.”