How F1’s sole rookie of 2022 proved his critics wrong

Zhou Guanyu may have been well-prepared by modern-day standards for his rookie Formula 1 season thanks to his private testing with Alpine and three years in F2. Yet nothing could have prepared him for the challenges and surprises that came his way in 2022.

He faced racist abuse in the wake of his announcement at Alfa Romeo; he found a car that could do no more than three laps without breaking due to porpoising; and he had the most dramatic crash of the season at Silverstone when his car flipped over and ended up behind a tyre wall. But Zhou came through all of it having proved his critics wrong, raised his stock and established his place in F1.

When Zhou sat down with Autosport ahead of the summer break, he summed up his first half-season as being “what an F1 driver would face in 10 years of their career”. Come the end of the season, the intensity of grid life remains his biggest surprise.

“You don’t catch a break,” he says. “You’re always fighting for something.”

At the start of the year, what Zhou was fighting for was credibility. Even with a decent junior record, the sponsorship boost he brought to F1 from China led to ‘pay driver’ tags and, worse still, racist abuse on social media that Zhou admitted he found hurtful.

Adding to the challenge was a pre-season that was short on mileage for Alfa Romeo, which was one of the teams worst-affected by porpoising.

“We were breaking parts,” recalls Xevi Pujolar, its head of trackside engineering. “We couldn’t put more than three laps together at one point during winter testing, otherwise we would run out of parts.”

Zhou impressed his team early on with his attitude amid reliability woes in testing

Photo by: Alfa Romeo

This made a final filming day after the Barcelona test crucial for Alfa Romeo to try to work out the problem. But after seeing team-mate Valtteri Bottas manage just 54 laps in the opening test, Zhou gave up his running to the Finn. It was a show of character that stuck with the now-former team principal Frederic Vasseur, who calls it “one of the very good signals” that Alfa Romeo had hired the right man.

“Coming from a rookie, it’s impressive,” says Vasseur. “This was the start of the strong collaboration between them, and the very strong relationship. A couple of times during the season, when we asked them to switch on-track, we didn’t finish the sentence from the pitwall and it was done.”

The fact that such switches were needed points to how close Zhou got to Bottas come the end of the season. It was not something Alfa Romeo anticipated from the word go, giving Zhou gentle targets: get some Q2 appearances by mid-season, then start fighting for points.

"It was a bit of a shame that when the car was really good, fighting for the top midfield, I wasn’t as experienced. With the reliability issues, we couldn’t convert that into results, which pays a lot at the end of the season" Zhou Guanyu

He did both at the very first attempt in Bahrain. Aided by the fact that the C42 car was one of the few to get close to the weight limit, Zhou qualified 15th on his debut. His car went into anti-stall at the start, causing him to drop to last, before a brilliant fightback allowed him to nab a point for 10th. It was a big statement to make.

“That was huge,” says Zhou. “Because of all the stuff I was facing over the winter break, when I was announced, a lot of people who don’t know me tried to judge me based on my nationality. So it’s not the nicest thing to have, when you’re fighting for your dream. But then I was just so grateful to have a first race debut and score a point, I got them off my back. To talk on-track, it means a lot to me.”

While Bottas capitalised on Alfa Romeo’s weight advantage in the early part of the season to be a points regular, Zhou was less prolific. He admits that one-lap pace in qualifying was a struggle for him, but the bigger issue was reliability as the team’s lack of mileage in pre-season began to bite. It cost Zhou what he believes were certain points in Miami and Baku.

“It was a bit of a shame that when the car was really good, fighting for the top midfield, I wasn’t as experienced,” Zhou says. “With the reliability issues, we couldn’t convert that into results, which pays a lot at the end of the season.”

It went some way to explaining why Bottas won the points head-to-head so comfortably, 49-6 come the end of the season. But 46 of Bottas’s points came in the opening nine races.

Water leak on lap six ended what he believes would have been a points-scoring race in Miami

Photo by: Alfa Romeo

The Canadian Grand Prix rightly stands out to Zhou as one of his best weekends of the season. On a track he did not know and in wet conditions, he reached Q3 before putting in a flawless race en route to eighth.

“That was something I never expected,” he admits. “It was a breakthrough point for me.”

It may have proved Zhou’s quality, yet it would not open the floodgates for the points. Alfa Romeo’s more conservative approach to development, combined with the other midfield teams solving some of their weight issues, meant the team slipped down the pecking order.

Zhou would score just once more, at Monza, but he feels he made a “huge step” as the year went on, particularly over a single lap to reduce the margin to Bottas. There was never any doubt that Zhou would get his contract extended.

“He did very well,” says Vasseur. “We had some issues on reliability, and this cost him a lot of points at the beginning of the season. He was even a bit faster in some qualis than Valtteri, and I think he’s still improving. He’s doing well. For me, there was no reason to change.”

It gave stability to Alfa Romeo after a successful start to its new era, bouncing back from three miserable years to finish sixth in the standings. Bottas may have been the team leader, bringing with him all the experience gained at Mercedes, but he feels that Zhou has made a huge contribution.

“We make a really good team-mate pairing,” says Bottas. “There’s really good respect both ways. Of course, no doubt, he still wants to beat me and I want to beat him! But we can work together really well.”

A sign of this came at Interlagos, when Zhou and Bottas were trailing Nicholas Latifi in the early stages of the Saturday sprint. Bottas noticed from two cars back that Latifi was braking early into Turn 10, so told the team to inform Zhou that it would be a good place to attack. He duly got the move done one lap later, with Bottas then following suit soon after in a well-orchestrated move to benefit the team.

Zhou has earned the respect of team-mate Bottas

Photo by: Alfa Romeo

Zhou has shown he has the pace to compete in F1, and has quickly established himself as a fine team player. But, as seen through so much of his career, it’s his mental strength that comes as his most impressive quality this season – perhaps no better displayed than in his frightening crash at Silverstone.

You’d expect Zhou to describe an impact in which his car turned upside-down, flipped in the gravel, went into the fence and fell behind a tyre wall as the nadir of his season. Oh no. Zhou instead describes the British GP as a “great moment” – he’d reached Q3 for the second race in a row.

Although he may have been alone in the rookie ‘class of 22’, discounting Nyck de Vries’s Monza cameo, Zhou’s performances proved this year that he deserved his F1 shot and that he is a valuable addition to the grid

“I was a bit unlucky, getting involved in such a big incident,” he says. “But I don’t feel that was my low point. If anything, it was going reasonably well.” It’s a mental steeliness that will serve Zhou well for the future.

Although he may have been alone in the rookie ‘class of 22’, discounting Nyck de Vries’s Monza cameo, Zhou’s performances proved this year that he deserved his F1 shot and that he is a valuable addition to the grid. The challenge for 2023 will be to continue his upward momentum, close the gap to Bottas further, and ensure the good vibes keep going at Alfa Romeo.

Zhou demonstrated mental steel to come back from his Silverstone shunt and keep the pressure on Bottas

Photo by: Alfa Romeo

One-race ‘rookie’ seizes his opportunity

As Formula 1 silly season started to simmer through the summer, Nyck de Vries was not a name at the forefront for a seat. Even with titles in Formula 2 and Formula E, the Dutchman appeared to have missed the Formula 1 boat, especially at the grand old age of 27.

But while having coffee in the Mercedes motorhome on the Saturday of the Italian GP, de Vries’s career took a dramatic turn. Overnight, Alex Albon had come down sick and was left in need of surgery on his appendix, prompting Williams to give the call to de Vries and draft him in as a supersub.

The slippery Williams FW44 was perfectly suited to Monza’s high-speed layout, yet de Vries had just FP3 to get up to speed ahead of qualifying. He made it through to Q2 and lined up eighth on the grid once penalties were applied, before nailing the Sunday audition, bringing home two points for ninth position even while managing some late brake concerns.

While celebrating over dinner one day later, de Vries’s compatriot Max Verstappen urged him to call Helmut Marko. The wheels were already in motion for Pierre Gasly to join Alpine and, with Red Bull’s bid to get IndyCar’s Colton Herta a superlicence stalling, a seat was going. Come October the deals were finalised and, at long last, de Vries had a full-time F1 seat with AlphaTauri clinched for 2023.

De Vries admits that Monza “sped up a lot of the conversations” for a long-awaited F1 graduation, and that it “took away any potential question marks and doubts people might have had”. In high-pressure circumstances with the slowest car on the grid, he had excelled: “All the stars aligned that weekend.”

De Vries may be one-third of F1’s 2023 rookie class, but he joins in a vastly different position to Logan Sargeant or Oscar Piastri. With his Mercedes experience, Formula E title and strong junior record, it’s a CV that few can offer – and proof that 27 is far from being ‘past it’ to make the leap to F1.

De Vries will be an AlphaTauri driver next year after impressing in his Monza cameo

Photo by: Michael Potts / Motorsport Images