Photo: Dutch Photo Agency
Jak Crawford was not happy with his driving after he finished third in Formula 2’s Spa-Francorchamps feature race, his fourth podium of 2024.
The DAMS driver qualified fourth, and after an early safety car period he held that position until the pitstop cycle began. He dropped to 14th following his own pitstop on lap nine of 25, and was back in fourth once everyone had switched to new tyres.
At that point there were eight laps to go, and Crawford was 3.2 seconds behind Hitech GP’s Paul Aron in third. He reduced it to under 1.2s on the next lap and 0.5s the lap after that, but on lap 21 the gap grew to 1.5s and there was 2.3s between them when Aron retired with a technical issue on the last lap and Crawford was promoted into a podium place.
“Honestly, I don’t feel very good. It was quite a bad race for me,” was Crawford’s reaction afterwards, focusing on how he felt about his driving rather than relishing the fact the result had lifted him from seventh to fifth in the championship.
“I feel like I performed quite, quite poorly. At some point in the race, I had really good pace, and Aron, I caught him [quite] quick. And then I made a few mistakes, I had a few lock-ups. And I had a massive snap, and I had the opportunity at the top of Eau Rouge [to pass]. And from there I had my tyres so bad and I didn’t recover.
“So [at] that point I thought I could pass Aron, almost for a second, and then start chasing the top two.”
Crawford emphasised “it’s a disappointing race from my side, but still great points”, and expanded on his tyre struggles.
“Maybe we didn’t understand how the degradation of the race was going to be, and what was needed. Just lost a bit of pace, I think overall. But usually we are quite strong on sort of degradation management, which I think I didn’t execute to my best ability today.”