Aston Martin will put Jak Crawford into FP1 at the Austrian Grand Prix, with the American third driver taking over Lance Stroll’s AMR26 for the opening one-hour session at the Red Bull Ring.
The team confirmed the plan ahead of the next Formula 1 race weekend, giving Crawford his fourth FP1 appearance for Aston Martin and his second of the 2026 season after Japan.
It is also Aston Martin’s second mandated rookie practice run of the year, a useful development marker for a driver already embedded in the team’s simulator programme and fresh from a Pirelli tyre test in Barcelona.
Crawford gets another Aston Martin race-weekend audition
According to Formula 1’s official update, Crawford will drive Stroll’s car in Austria on a circuit he knows from F2 and F3, two years after he first tested an Aston Martin F1 car at the same venue.
The opportunity matters because Aston Martin are not simply fulfilling a regulation. Crawford has been doing simulator work through the season, and Mike Krack framed the run as another chance to evaluate his progress in a proper race-weekend environment.
For Crawford, the immediate target is clean mileage and useful feedback rather than headline lap times. But with F1 seats always judged on the moments teams actually see, Austria gives him another public audition in machinery that can define how seriously he is viewed inside Aston Martin’s future plans.
