TREMAYNE: Remembering the day Zhou made history in Shanghai – and made a whole nation proud

This weekend in Shanghai, the home fans will be keeping eagle eyes out for a guy smartly attired in the distinctive red of the sport’s oldest established F1 team – Scuderia Ferrari – and cheering his name.

No, not Lewis Hamilton, after his switch from Mercedes, though he will be super-popular here – but Zhou Guanyu, the young racer from Shanghai who created such a momentous bit of national history at this track last year when he became the first Chinese driver ever to compete in the Chinese GP.

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Back then he had been the busiest F1 driver in the build-up to the race, as it returned to the calendar for the first time since 2019.

“My first race here, I watched back in the day in 2004,” he had smiled on the Thursday. Twenty years earlier he had been only four years old. “The man sitting next to me [he indicated Fernando Alonso] was racing already! I can’t imagine how he is still here, racing at a very high level.

“But for me it's been 20 years waiting for this Grand Prix. And, yeah, let's say this journey has been not extremely easy, just because where I'm coming from, and also, you know, trying to win at least a lot of races in feeder series to be here.

“And then once in F1, every year, of course, when you realise that the home race is not happening, two years in a row, you try to kind of do your best to maintain your seat so you can be here today…

“So for me, of course, I'm still focused on my job, like always. I know this is very… let's say a big mix of emotions going to this weekend, especially on Sunday when we have the national anthem going on and also the memories on which you quickly reflect in your mind.

“And hopefully, it's not going to be the only one because I'm planning hopefully to stay here as long as I can. Everybody loves to be having a long career in Formula 1 and that's where we dream to be.”

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Remember that heart-warming moment at the end of last year’s race?

He’d got there with 10th place in qualifying for Saturday’s Sprint, in which he had finished ninth, just outside the points. Sauber’s troubled C44s had enhanced performance after technical boss James Key had made changes that generated more heat in their Pirelli tyres.

In FP1, he had been right behind team mate Valtteri Bottas (the man who occasionally beat Lewis Hamilton, remember), and that was often the case; there wasn’t a lot to choose between the two when everything was going well.

Zhou then qualified 16th, and while Bottas had been an early race retirement with engine problems, in any case all of the spectators’ focus had been on the man in the cockpit of Sauber number 24. For the first time they had one of their own to cheer for. Naturally, they had very high hopes for him.

Here was the young boy who had started karting in China then moved to Sheffield in the UK in 2012 to further his racing career. In 2013 with local team Strawberry Racing he had won both the Super 1 National Rotax Max Junior Championship and the Rotax Max Euro Challenge, partnering Lando Norris in his final year in his sole participation in the Karting World Championship with Ricky Flynn Motorsport.

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He then joined the Ferrari Driver Academy from 2014 to 2018, and then the Alpine Academy until 2021, regularly testing F1 machinery while racing strongly – and winning races – in F2. He finally made his F1 racing debut with Alfa Romeo (the old Sauber team) in 2022 alongside Valtteri Bottas, and scored a point on his debut in Bahrain.

He was a regular point scorer in 2023 but 2024 was much tougher (though he would score Kick Sauber’s sole points later in the season with a well-driven eighth place in Qatar). Overall, his three seasons would yield 16 points and two fastest laps.

In China, he was determined to honour his countrymen’s vociferous support with a worthy performance, and he drove his heart out. But in that C44, on that day on that track, juggling the set of circumstances with which life had presented him at that crucially important moment, 14th place was the best he could do.

Like so many drivers doomed to run in the lower half of the field he could have done better in a more competitive machine, but them’s the breaks, as the old saying goes.

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The team had even put him on a set of soft tyres to facilitate a charge through to the points, but as it turned out that wasn’t the answer and Zhou’s bold gamble did not pay off.

At the end of the race, as second-placed Lando Norris made his sole error in a great personal performance and drove his McLaren into the pits instead of parking it on the start/finish line, Zhou did things the opposite way around.

But that was not an error. In a wonderful gesture by Formula 1 bosses that the fans appreciated deep in their hearts, his marker board awaited him there, where his compatriots in the main grandstands could see him so clearly.

And as the green and black car rolled to a halt, its race run, their driver unbuckled his belts, clasped the halo and hauled himself up in the cockpit. Their cheers echoed up and down the pit straight.

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Zhou tugged of his gloves and his helmet, and bent forward momentarily to stretch his limbs and get the blood flowing through them again. It was what he always did immediately after a race. But with a sudden rush the pure emotion of the moment overwhelmed him as he straightened up and stepped out, and he wept.

We all love to see it when the emotion of the moment strikes winners or podium finishers. In general, because of the nature of their job, racers are pretty cool people. Good poker players. So much so that it’s all too easy to overlook their underlying feelings.

The hope, determination and, sometimes, pain, that lies beneath the surface. Look at Isack Hadjar in Melbourne last week, when such a great performance in practice and Qualifying came to naught on the formation lap.

They all feel that, to greater or lesser degrees, since even those obliged by circumstance to run in the middle of the pack or at the back have their hopes and the dreams. And there was Zhou, racing in front of his countrymen, creating his own – and their – little bit of history.

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The only man from one of the world’s biggest nations to have achieved something that all who witnessed it will never forget. The boy from Shanghai who was only approaching five years old when he watched that home race back in 2004, and people he had raced this very day – Fernando, Lewis and Max Verstappen – had yet to win to be crowned World Champions.

Oddly and through the circumstances of the timing of tyre changes, he had set the race’s third fastest lap, behind Fernando and Max, and ahead of Lando Norris. Who knows whether there was another young child watching from the stands that day, in whom a similar fire of ambition had been lit…

In Melbourne last week, Zhou looked very smart in his Ferrari gear, in his role as test and reserve driver to Lewis and Charles Leclerc. It was a homecoming, and another little bit of history: the first Chinese driver to be signed as a works Ferrari F1 team member.

So which felt better: the first time he’d tested a TCR Ferrari at Fiorano as an official team driver? Or that day in Shanghai back in 2024?

He smiled before he answered.

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“Testing that Ferrari was a great feeling. But… nothing will ever replicate the feelings I had that day in Shanghai, in front of all my countrymen…”

It was a poignant moment amid all the hubbub of the start of the 2025 season, because he will no longer be racing unless something happens to his team mates, and the unspoken words were that most likely that moment in his homeland will remain the zenith of an F1 career that may have come to its end.