Want to know what the future holds? You need to meet the people building it. In our series Who’s Next, we profile rising stars of culture, tech, style, wellness and beyond.
Formula 1 fever has swept across the U.S., and now the pieces are almost in place to cement its grip. There are FOMO-fueled races in Miami, Austin and Las Vegas. It’s finally competitive enough to excite the viewing public, with Red Bull driver Max Verstappen’s dominance looking more precarious than ever. And an iconic American brand, Cadillac, is set to add an 11th F1 team to the roster in 2026. Now all the sport needs is a hometown driver worth cheering for.
That’s where Jak Crawford comes in.
A 19-year-old phenom who has been racing on four wheels since he was six years old, Crawford is about to begin his third season in Formula 2, the racing series a step below F1, but he already has his sights set on the big show. “That would be my goal…being in F1 for 2026,” Crawford told InsideHook on a recent Zoom call from his parents’ home in Houston, Texas.
If Crawford seems a little young to be eyeing a spot in the most prestigious and ruthless racing league in the world, piloting a vehicle that can rocket up to 230 mph, you should know that F1 has been fixated on shepherding in young talent in the last decade. Verstappen, the sport’s reigning champion, also holds the title of youngest driver to ever race in the series (at 17, in 2015) and youngest to win a Grand Prix (at 18).
While Verstappen may be an anomaly in his success, so is Crawford. Throughout his motorsports career, which began with go-kart racing in the single digits, he’s frequently been the youngest driver on the track, often by a handful of years. Despite being a perpetual underclassman, and initially dreaming of NASCAR or IndyCar as the ultimate goal, it’s in those early karting years where Crawford was first told by an onlooker that he could be an international F1 superstar some day. But it’s only recently that he’s felt ready to reach out and claim that destiny.
“This year was quite a significant year. I was able to actually drive a Formula 1 car three times, and of course race against a lot of people that are moving into Formula 1,” Crawford said, alluding to his tests as a development driver in Aston Martin’s F1 team and some of his F2 competition getting promoted. “I’ve raced against and beaten people that are racing in Formula 1 this season, so I feel like I have what it takes now.”

The Fast Track to F1
Crawford distinctly remembers the first time he ever pushed down the pedal in a go-kart. When he was just four years old, he drove around his preschool parking lot in Charlotte, North Carolina. His father, Tim, who works in real estate development, entered him in his first official race at the tender age of six, after his family moved to Houston. It wasn’t long before he was punching above his weight.
When Jak was eight, he found himself racing at “a pretty high level against a lot of 10, 11-year-olds”; at 11 in junior karting, he was beating 14-year-olds; at 13 in Formula 4, when the go-karts are swapped for what look like mini F1 cars that can achieve speeds around 150 mph, he was besting drivers who were 19. This was all before he had a driver’s license.
“When I moved into Formula 3, you have to be 16 to race, and I think my birthday was three days before the first race weekend,” he recalled. “I was super young. Even at the F3 level, there were some guys that were six, seven years older than me.”
Everyone loves a prodigy story. That’s part of the reason why Jak — short for Jakston, his middle name, which he’s used his entire life over Carlton, his given first name — has been told since his early racing days that he has what it takes to become an F1 driver. But his most valuable asset might just be his willingness to slow his career down. As the formula racing world becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the next high-speed wunderkind, due in large part to the increasingly lucrative status of the sport, where the average F1 team is worth over $2 billion, there is no shortage of stories of young drivers flaming out, often in spectacular fashion.
I’ve raced against and beaten people that are racing in Formula 1 this season, so I feel like I have what it takes now.
– Jak Crawford
Logan Sargeant, the most recent American driver to compete in F1, was jettisoned by his team, Williams Racing, in the middle of the 2024 season after a brief 36-race career in which he was only able to notch one point in total. (Points are awarded to the top 10 finishers out of 20 during a normal race.) Sargeant’s final appearance, in the Dutch Grand Prix in August when he was only 23 years old, was defined by a wheel-rending crash during practice that set his car aflame.
“I feel like Logan was actually fairly unlucky,” said Crawford, reflecting on Sargeant’s fast rise and precipitous fall on racing’s biggest stage. “I feel like he got thrown into the deep end.”
“The lessons me and my management are trying to take is that there’s no reason to rush,” he added, noting that Sargeant only raced in one full season of F2, while Crawford is about to begin his third, and his second with the lauded DAMS team from France. “Of course, if I have an opportunity [in F1 this year], I’ll take it. But I’m not going to just go all for it. I feel like it’s best to learn and develop as much as possible.”
During the 70% of his life that he’s been racing, Crawford has already learned some tough lessons, not that you’d know it from listening to him recount them. His languid cadence, punctuated frequently with the typical Gen Z filler phrase “you know,” sounds like you’re listening to a college freshman describe his morning astronomy lecture. And that’s what many of his peers are doing: going to college, working at a Starbucks or Target, figuring out who and what they want to be.
Since he was 11 years old, Crawford knew that he wanted to commit to racing, and that he’d need to make lots of sacrifices to achieve that high-speed dream.

What Are You Willing to Sacrifice?
The elements of a normal childhood that Crawford gave up in pursuit of racing glory started small. He dropped other sports, like baseball, soccer and basketball, in order to focus on driving, but lots of high-achieving athletes do the same. He enrolled in online high school so that he could race in Europe, but most kids his age also spent at least part of their grade-school years on the internet due to COVID restrictions. But it’s the beginning of that pandemic that truly shows how fast he was forced to grow up compared to his peers.
In 2020, when Crawford was 14 years old, he was set to race in German and Italian Formula 4 with a Dutch team. In order to accommodate the practice, travel and race schedule, he moved to the Netherlands to live with a man who worked for the team, Van Amersfoort, in the town of Harderwijk, which is 50 minutes outside of Amsterdam.
“My mom had traveled over with me,” Crawford explained. “Literally my mom left and then two days later everything came down. Pretty much every country was on lockdown at that point and all these COVID rules came into place.” It would be nine months before Crawford would see his family in person again.

At the same time as he was living in the attic of a stranger’s house, driving a racing simulator to stay sharp for when he could get back in a car again, Crawford was under the additional pressure of representing the Red Bull Junior Team. The most coveted driving academy of the modern era, it has brought up both Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel, who each have four F1 championships to their name, among other top talent. While joining that elite squad is a dream come true for any racing hopeful, it’s important to remember that this is not a team sport. These teenagers aren’t joining an athletic “family,” as football and basketball players often say; they’re being tossed into a battle royale, led by an octogenarian Austrian who seems to revel in pitting the boys against one another.
That would be Helmut Marko, Red Bull’s head of driver development. He’s a former driver himself, though his career was cut short when a rock punctured his visor during the 1972 French Grand Prix and blinded him in his left eye. Now, “Dr. Helmut Marko,” as Crawford still refers to him — a reference to the 81-year-old’s doctorate in law — is better known for the Jekyll-and-Hyde tactics he uses on his pupils.
In Crawford’s case, Marko signed the youngster to a contract after just the first day of a three-day driving test, a remarkable vote of confidence in such a young talent. “That was an amazing moment and definitely one I’ll never forget,” Crawford said. But that initial support was quickly replaced by a “cuthroat” reality.
“I was teammates also with another Red Bull Junior driver,” he said, a reference to England’s Jonny Edgar. “Helmut had told both of us that we both had to win both [F4] championships. So, you know, obviously straightaway there was a bit of pressure.”
Crawford stayed cool, but that wasn’t enough. After a few seasons of impressive driving that regrettably didn’t meet Marko’s near-impossible expectation of championship trophies, the up-and-comer felt himself “being pushed out” of Red Bull.

Completing the Puzzle
These days, Crawford has moved on from Red Bull and joined the Aston Martin Aramco Young Driver Development program, which makes him an official part of their F1 team. After finishing 13th in his first F2 season in 2023, he moved up to 5th place last year with the DAMS Lucas Oil team, and now he’s gunning for first place during the upcoming season that starts in Melbourne, Australia in March and ends on Yas Island in the United Arab Emirates in December. The odds are in his favor as all four drivers who scored higher than him (and even the driver a rung below) last year have all moved on, most to F1. The title is his for the taking.
“I feel like I already had the speed to win a championship,” he said of his performance in 2024. Now, it’s all about “putting everything together.”
Behind the scenes, Crawford and his management are piecing together a different sort of puzzle, one that could give him options if there’s no pathway to an F1 seat at Aston Martin, which has two relatively reliable drivers in Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.
In November, American motorsports giant Andretti Global announced Crawford as a new reserve driver for their team in Formula E, an electric racing series. Besides giving him opportunities directly, the involvement with Andretti — which for years was leading the effort with General Motors to add a new team to F1 — may help his case with Cadillac as they put together a team to compete in 2026. A new American squad with a young, handsome, dark-haired American speed demon? For an international sport with billions on the line, that sounds like the stars aligning.
As for Crawford, he isn’t looking up at those stars just yet.
“I work with a sports psychologist,” he said, as a way of explaining how he manages the tightrope of competing in F2 while being able to smell the fumes of F1. “I feel like it’s really important not to focus on what could happen, what could be there. I think it’d be very easy to get caught up in it.”
“It’s a sport where so much could happen and so much can change so fast. It’s important to just stay in the moment and focus on one week at a time.”
Whether you’re looking to get into shape, or just get out of a funk, The Charge has got you covered. Sign up for our new wellness newsletter today.