How a Shanghai to Sheffield journey paved the way for China’s F1 hero

One floor below ground, in the crowded pedestrian vestibule connecting London’s Piccadilly Circus with Leicester Square – still bustling with tourists despite the Stygian murk enveloping the capital – lies Zhou Guanyu’s favourite eatery in the city. It tells you much about China’s first Formula 1 racer that this is no exclusive, highfalutin, Michelin-starred establishment but a busy, friendly Szechuan-style diner: Haidilao Hot Pot, a chain with hundreds of branches around the globe.

As we’re guided to a quiet back room, it’s clear Zhou is a frequent flyer here. Every member of staff gives him a cheery greeting and he browses the iPad-based menu with a confident sweep of the fingers.

“Anyone got any allergies, things they don’t like?”

We leave ourselves in his hands on the comestibles front and relocate to the sauce counter, where a seemingly boundless quantity of ingredients awaits, from oils and soy sauce to leaves, nuts, chillies and herbs. Zhou fills two pots, decanting into one of them a substantial quantity of minced garlic followed by a good glug of soy sauce.

“This is excellent with the beef,” he assures us, though we’re glad we’re sitting at the opposite side of the table…

After a five-year hiatus, the Chinese Grand Prix has returned to the calendar this season. F1’s relationship with the world’s most populous nation is a complex one: former ‘ringmaster’ Bernie Ecclestone was determined to break into the market there, believing prosperous Chinese companies could fill the sponsorship void being created by tobacco’s enforced departure. Instead, it became apparent that F1 needed China more than China needed F1. Initially, tickets had to be given away to encourage spectators to make the schlep to the vast purpose-built circuit on what was, at the time, the undeveloped fringes of Shanghai’s great metropolis.

PLUS: How F1’s arrival in China proved a success in unexpected ways

One of those people was a very young Zhou Guanyu.

“My earliest memories of F1 are of the Alonso-Schumacher era – I went to the first Chinese Grand Prix in 2004,” he says. “It was fascinating… the speed, the noise of those V10s. You could feel them as well as hear them, before you even got into the grandstand. It gave me goosebumps. And just imagining what it would be like to be inside one of the world’s quickest racing cars – I realised then that’s what I wanted to do.”

Zhou gets a grilling from GP Racing's finest

Photo by: Alister Thorpe / GP Racing

Now there is a thriving domestic racing scene, though chiefly based on tin-tops. Such organised karting as existed was less competitive than the European racing scene, as Zhou discovered after visiting the UK at the age of 10 and entering a Rotax Minimax race (also featuring a certain George Russell) as a toe-in-the-water exercise.

“I realised I had a decision to make,” he says as two vats of broth are brought in and slotted into heated enclosures within the table. “Either stay – go to school, study, grow up in Shanghai, have racing as a hobby – or move to the UK, start a professional journey, try to get to F1. For me it was quite straightforward – I took the second option! I wanted to be in F1 and I’d do everything I could to achieve this dream.

“To move away – it was quite tough for a few years, adapting to the culture and the level of racing. All the best young drivers were there, the level was so much higher.

“I was a kid, I just loved driving the go-karts, being able to control the wheels myself, so the decision to go was quite straightforward. Actually, if I were to think about doing something similar now, it would be quite difficult. But at the time I was very young and I thought, ‘Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.’

"It was a bit of a shock, coming from a huge city like Shanghai. Plus Sheffield is all the way up north and there’s no summer really. But still my mechanics dressed in shorts. And this is a British thing, all the way up to F3, F2… whatever the weather, shorts and t-shirts" Zhou Guanyu

“The UK was an easy choice – the home of Formula 1 and so many world champions from the past. It was the place to be. So that’s why I moved all the way from China to… Sheffield.”

Steel city tour

Into the bubbling vats of broth – one tomato, the other Mala, several ratchets up the Scoville scale – go thin, marbled slices of beef short rib, an assortment of tofu chunks and some shrimp cubes. The ‘Ma’ in Mala is Chinese for the sense of tingling numbness on the lips induced by the presence of hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, a naturally occurring chemical in Szechuan peppers.

The big draw of Sheffield was not the local ice hockey team, the Sheffield Steelers (basketball is more Zhou’s thing), nor its rich post-industrial musical heritage which begat seminal electronica from the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League. Sheffield is the base of Tony Kart importer Strawberry Racing, which in 2012 merged with the multiple title-winning Tony Kart Junior Racing Team.

Zhou made Sheffield his second home to pursue his F1 dream

Photo by: Alister Thorpe / GP Racing

2012 was very much a learning year, with the highlight being fourth place in the Rotax Mini Max category of the Super 1 National Challenge (Lando Norris was second). The following season he won the Rotax Max Junior category of that championship, along with the Rotax Max Euro Challenge.

“It was a bit of a shock, coming from a huge city like Shanghai,” he says. “Plus Sheffield is all the way up north and there’s no summer really. But still, my mechanics dressed in shorts. And this is a British thing, all the way up to F3, F2… whatever the weather, shorts and t-shirts. I enjoyed living in Yorkshire, I could focus purely on racing and going to school, learning the language. I made some good friends, some good memories with the team.

“I moved with my mum, I was so young – I couldn’t live by myself. She looked after everything. The support was important because for the first few months, going to school, I didn’t really know what everyone was talking about because of the language issue. So that was tough. But compared with Shanghai and even London, everyone in Yorkshire is super-chilled. The pace of life is less hurried. At school the teachers were really relaxed, helping me to improve in every single subject. I have great memories.

“When I came to the UK I’d won literally every championship in China. As a kid, standing on the top step of the podium every weekend… then I came to the UK and I was finishing outside the top 10. These are heart-breaking moments for a kid, right? But I realised I had to gradually increase my knowledge to be competitive against the best. So a year later I was able to reach a lot of podiums and start winning. I was competing with Lando [Norris] back then. Lewis Hamilton’s name was on some of the championship trophies – they had the names of previous winners etched into the bases. It was a big thing for me to have my name on the same trophy as a world champion! That was an important year, 2013, winning the British and European championships. It made me think I could achieve my dream.”

 Living it up

“Now we’re getting the hang of it…” GP Racing juggles a slotted ladle, a small plate and a pair of chopsticks in pursuit of a slice of beef determined to elude human grasp and return to its chilli broth bath.

“Hmmmm,” muses Zhou with some amusement, raising an eyebrow as if to suggest this piece of self-assessment is somewhat optimistic.

For his move to single-seaters in 2014 Zhou moved again, to Italy, joining the Ferrari Driver Academy alongside Jules Bianchi, Lance Stroll, Antonio Fuoco and Raffaele Marciello. Ferrari was a recent convert to operating a young-driver development programme; the Academy had partly come about as a means of giving Michael Schumacher’s former race engineer Luca Baldisserri a factory-based position after he was ousted from the race team when the 2009 F1 car proved to be an embarrassing flop. Baldisserri threw himself into his new role with gusto and would ultimately leave with Stroll, taking a race-engineering job again, when Lance got a Williams F1 drive in 2017.

Having joined the Ferrari youngster ranks, he was taken under the wing of Luca Baldisserri

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“He’s a very straightforward guy, always to the point,” recalls Zhou. “For me, as a young kid back then, I felt under quite a lot of pressure, but it was clear Luca knew so much about the technical side – and about the driver’s side. Some people don’t have that perspective. It was quite a nice period for me, just stepping up to Formula 4. Luca wasn’t just running the academy but also coming to the track a lot and looking at the data. He was totally on top of the telemetry, the details of car and driver performance.

“Ferrari was one of the first teams to bring in engineers at the trackside for its academy. That was Luca. Then it kind of got stopped for a few years afterwards [Massimo Rivola, another victim of F1 team politics, took over from Baldisserri in 2016] but, while he was there, he was the one who pushed to have engineers assigned to the drivers to give them as much help as possible.”

Zhou swapped horses for the Renault Sport Academy in 2018, a new iteration of the programme which had produced Fernando Alonso and Robert Kubica, among others. 

Renault might have been considerably less successful on track than Ferrari, but its programme offered more opportunities in the F1 simulator plus the tantalising possibility of getting time in the F1 car during testing.

"I just wanted to get my feet into Formula 1 with any team, so to do it with an iconic brand like Alfa Romeo, and such an experienced team, it was a great start to the journey" Zhou Guanyu

Two wins and a sprinkling of other podiums hadn’t been enough to beat Prema team-mate Mick Schumacher in the final FIA F3 European Championship – a costly series of mid-season DNFs contributed to Zhou finishing eighth – but he progressed to Formula 2 with UNI-Virtuosi while Mick made the jump with Prema. He finished seventh in the standings, the highest-placed rookie behind a gaggle of multi-year drivers headed by champion Nyck de Vries, while Schumacher was 12th.

In the Covid-affected 2020 season it all clicked for Mick, less so for Zhou despite taking his first sprint race win and another handful of podiums. 2021 brought a revised weekend format, with two reverse-grid sprint races rather than one in addition to the longer feature race with the mandatory pitstop. Claiming his first feature-race victory in the Bahrain season-opener, plus a sprint win in Monaco, put him into the points lead before a costly shunt and non-points finish enabled Oscar Piastri to catch up – and then overhaul him after another DNF at Silverstone. Spinning on the formation lap for the first sprint in Sochi was also costly. A win and a second place in the final round then enabled him to consolidate third place and secure the F1 seat he’d been pursuing with Alfa Romeo.

“That was a tough season because I led, I thought I had a very good chance of winning it, and without those issues, I would have been second for sure rather than third,” Zhou says. “Before the start I’d set myself the target of finishing in the top three at least, to give me hope of F1. And it was a hard season – the top 10 was at a very high level.

Zhou's third place in the 2021 F2 championship saw him picked up by Alfa Romeo for his F1 debut for the following season

Photo by: James Gasperotti / Motorsport Images

“To be leading at the beginning was great, then in Baku I had that throttle problem – I was going into Turn 1 with 80% throttle and 100% brake, it was a big mess.”

Piastri deservedly won the title – but, since Alpine had Alonso and Esteban Ocon under contract, there was no F1 seat waiting for him.

“It was quite lucky for me because my Alpine Academy contract was finishing, so theoretically I could do whatever I wanted,” says Zhou.

“Oscar had a different situation because he was still under contract for another year. I just wanted to get my feet into Formula 1 with any team, so to do it with an iconic brand like Alfa Romeo, and such an experienced team, it was a great start to the journey. A lot of successful drivers started with the Sauber group – Kimi Raikkonen went on to be world champion.
So for me, there was no better choice.”

Take care of yourself

Zhou was also conscious of the dangers of getting ‘stuck’ in F2, a series that too often fails on its mandate to feed new drivers into F1 – as evinced most recently by Piastri and 2022 champion Felipe Drugovich.

“Yeah, it’s the series that’s closest to F1 but once you’re there, you’re just waiting for your turn. A lot of F2 drivers have a reserve role in F1 but that can distract your focus. I was the reserve driver for Alpine but I didn’t spend much time in the F1 paddock, I concentrated on F2 racing and F1 testing and that was it. I thought, ‘I don’t need to be showing my face in the F1 paddock, or on TV, yet.’ I had to do the best job possible in F2 to give myself the best chance of getting the Sauber seat.

“I didn’t want to be sitting there doing nothing. OK, the simulator is fine, the factory support role, but for me having a championship to race in, continuously gaining knowledge that way, was more of a benefit.”

After a confidence-building maiden grand prix in Bahrain, where Zhou recovered to 10th after both Alfa Romeos suffered electronic glitches at the start, the 2022 season was marred by more car trouble and a spectacular high-speed shunt at Silverstone. There, Pierre Gasly tagged Russell into a spin which collected Zhou’s car and flipped it over, ultimately coming to rest on the other side of the tyre barrier. Having been released from the medical centre, Zhou texted his engineer to ask if his seat was intact and able to be fitted into a spare chassis for the Austrian round the following weekend.

Zhou was fortunate to escape injury in his huge crash at the start of the 2022 British GP

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

It’s clear Zhou has no problem separating the Instagram lifestyle of an F1 driver away from the track from the diligent professionalism required once he swipes his pass at the paddock gates.

“Of course, on Thursdays, it’s great for the fans if we come in wearing some cool outfits,” he says. “But apart from that the focus is on the job. At the track, it’s about the car and the engineering office. Away from the track I have various things I do that enable me to switch off. I enjoy designing stuff, looking sharp. I’m able to show another side of myself. It’s good to have opportunities to do other stuff.”

Besides lucrative ambassadorships for Dior and Lululemon, Zhou has also joined the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Alex Albon in generating social value from his profile as a leading sports personality. Last year he became a global ambassador for the Special Olympics, the sporting organisation for children and adults with intellectual disabilities.

“Giving something back is important,” he says. “With the Special Olympics, they’re athletes just like me. I had the invitation to go to the World Games in Berlin last year and was amazed at how many of the competitors were F1 fans. It’s a different sort of competition from F1 but we have so much in common – in each category, everyone is trying to better themselves, maximise their performance, get more out of themselves. I’ve got so much respect for the athletes. It was a pleasure to get involved, watch the action, and share my experience. And I was able to bring some athletes to the paddock in Silverstone last year.”

"In a way it’s quite strange because I’ve never raced on that track. It’s going to be a fantastic feeling, on the first out-lap, after dreaming about it since I was a kid, to think, ‘here we go, we’ve achieved that’" Zhou Guanyu

While Zhou lives in London for its convenient global travel links, he regards Shanghai as home and “the city I love the most”. He admits to having been a little worried that his time in F1 might not have coincided with the return of the Chinese Grand Prix, since young drivers’ careers at the top flight can be fleeting. But, after a late-notice cancellation last year, it’s finally back – and the tickets have sold out.

PLUS: What the Chinese GP's highlights reveal about its first F1 race for five years

“From a driving perspective, I’ll approach that weekend like any other. But I think it’ll be fascinating when I go to the track, thinking about five years ago [the last Chinese GP], being so close to F1 but still not knowing if I had a chance. And 10 years ago I had just started the journey. And before that coming as a fan. All that history will come very quickly to mind.

“In a way it’s quite strange because I’ve never raced on that track. It’s going to be a fantastic feeling, on the first out-lap, after dreaming about it since I was a kid, to think, ‘here we go, we’ve achieved that’. The past two years I’ve been gutted not to have a home race, so that feeling as I come out of the pits for the first time will be special.”

Zhou finally gets his first home F1 race - 20 years on from attending the first Chinese GP as a young fan

Photo by: Alister Thorpe / GP Racing

Here’s Ho-Pin: China’s F1 nearly men

Zhou Guanyu might be the first Chinese driver to race in F1 but others have tried and just fallen short. Ho-Pin Tung, Dutch-born to parents from the eastern province of Zhejiang, earned a test with Williams in 2003 after winning the Formula BMW Asia series. Victory in the 2006 German F3 championship would be the high point of his single-seater career; results were patchy with the Astromega-run Team China entry in the A1GP series, and test-driving gigs with BMW-Sauber and Renault came to nothing after a fractured vertebra curtailed his 2009 GP2 season. He was more successful in sportscars, taking a class win at Le Mans, and currently heads up the Hong Kong private office of the estate agency Knight Frank.

As F1 sought to gain traction with Chinese sponsors, Bernie Ecclestone tacitly backed another prospect, Shanghai’s Qinghua Ma, into a test driver role in 2012. Unfortunately, since Bernie seldom dug into his own pockets, the gig was with struggling HRT, already fizzling out in its second year of existence. With just one championship to his name – the 1600cc category of the Chinese Touring Car Championship – and a handful of single-seater outings, Ma was underprepared for F1. There was talk of a race seat with HRT in 2013 but the team collapsed at the end of 2012 and he slipped off the agenda, thereafter racing with some success in various touring car championships.

After a couple of near-misses, China finally found its first F1 driver with Zhou

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images