Zhou earned new deal but has a career habit to break in 2023 · RaceFans

One of the strongest indicators of Alfa Romeo’s confidence in their rookie Zhou Guanyu was not the fact that earlier this week they signed the Chinese for a second season, but that the news had been anticipated since the summer break.

That is normally the peak of the Formula 1 silly season, and it certainly proved to be this year with the drama at Alpine and McLaren. Zhou was not the only contender for the seat in 2023, yet he could feel more confident of staying on the grid than several more established drivers.

A glance over Zhou’s results in his first 16 F1 races may not suggest he has had a spectacular season. Yes, he scored a point on his debut, but he has only finished in the top ten twice since and reached Q3 just once. That career-best qualifying performance at Silverstone was almost immediately undone by a huge crash – one for which the rookie was blameless.

But he bounced back from that, getting closer to Valtteri Bottas’s pace in the other Alfa Romeo. Zhou out-qualified his team mate in the Dutch Grand Prix, leaving Bottas curious at how Zhou dialled out oversteer in the higher-speed corners.

Zhou came out on top between the two in qualifying again at the Italian Grand Prix. More importantly for Alfa Romeo, he converted his ninth place on the Monza grid (thanks to power unit penalties for several drivers) into 10th place in the race and his team’s first point since June’s Canadian Grand Prix, when he also scored. Over the past nine races, 10-times grand prix winner Bottas has only contributed one point more than Zhou.

Alfa Romeo have fallen down the pecking order over the course of the season. The team was at their most competitive at the beginning of the season when Zhou was new to F1, could not rely as much on his team’s experience due to how radically new the 2022 technical regulations were, and was visiting a series of unfamiliar circuits.

Yet two of Zhou’s best results came in Jeddah and Melbourne in the races immediately after his debut, showing he was quick to learn and adapt. That’s a trait that he has carried throughout his car racing career.

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In Formula 4 he reached the podium in his first two races, then in the Italian championship won all three races on his first visit to Monza early in the season. But he was a less frequent visitor to the podium after that and was a distant runner-up to champion Ralf Aron.