Aston Martin will hand Jak Crawford another Friday run at Spa this weekend, with the American set to take over Fernando Alonso’s AMR26 for FP1 at the Belgian Grand Prix.
It’ll be Crawford’s third appearance in a grand prix weekend session this season and, as these things go, it’s less about any dramatic reshuffle in green than it is about teams being forced to treat Friday mornings as a live test bench. The 2026 rules require each outfit to run a rookie — defined as someone with no more than two F1 starts — in at least four FP1 sessions across the year, split two-and-two between the cars. With Spa reverting to a standard three-practice format after recent Sprint outings, it’s one of the more straightforward opportunities to tick the box without turning a weekend upside down.
Crawford was named Aston Martin’s third driver ahead of this season after finishing runner-up in the 2025 Formula 2 championship. He already stood in for Alonso at Suzuka earlier in the year when the Spaniard arrived late after the birth of his first child, and he also featured in FP1 in Austria.
The curious part is that these rookie sessions, once treated as polite cameos, are now being watched inside the paddock with a slightly sharper eye. In Austria, Crawford ended the hour two places ahead of Alonso, albeit down in 20th, and his best lap was 0.131s quicker than the two-time world champion’s. Context matters — fuel, tyres, run plans and traffic always skew FP1 — but it was still a neat little data point for a driver trying to turn limited mileage into credibility.
His Suzuka outing earlier in the season was less flattering on the stopwatch, where he was around a second slower than Lance Stroll. Again, it’s FP1, and teams rarely hand a young driver the car in the same trim as the race regulars. But the comparison underlines what Aston Martin will be looking for at Spa: clean execution, sensible feedback, and enough pace to justify the disruption.
From Alonso’s perspective, this move also has a practical upside. With Crawford taking his car again, Aston Martin has now satisfied the rookie-session requirement on Alonso’s side of the garage for the season. That gives the team freedom later in the year, when development schedules tighten and every practice run becomes a fight for track time.
Stroll, meanwhile, has only sat out FP1 once so far in 2026 — he missed the opening practice at last month’s Austrian Grand Prix — which means he’ll need to give up at least one more session across the remaining 12 rounds to meet the same obligation.
Aston Martin confirmed the plan on Monday, posting: “Back behind the wheel at Spa. Third Driver Jak Crawford will participate in FP1 at the Belgian GP, driving Fernando Alonso’s AMR26.”
What makes Spa a logical venue is the return to the conventional weekend format. The Belgian Grand Prix had been a Sprint event in both 2023 and 2025, where teams only get that single FP1 before parc fermé and the rest of the weekend’s competitive running. With three practice sessions available this time, the cost of sacrificing one hour is easier to absorb — and for a midfield team that needs every chance to refine its set-up, it’s a much more palatable trade.
For Crawford, it’s another chance to make himself hard to ignore. In 2026, rookies aren’t just learning the ropes — they’re being measured, session by session, against established references in conditions that look increasingly like real work rather than ceremonial mileage. Spa’s a proper circuit for that: fast, technical, and brutally honest if you’re not on top of the car.
