As the only rookie in the field in 2022, Zhou Guanyu lacked direct competition to compare his performances with aside from a very experienced older team mate in Valtteri Bottas.
But compared to some of those who had stepped up to Formula 1 the season before – Yuki Tsunoda, Mick Schumacher and his team mate – Zhou’s first season was defined by how relatively few mistakes he made.
While he did not mark himself out as a future world champion on the basis of his performances in 2022, he did show himself to be a safe pair of hands behind the wheel who would not give his Alfa Romeo cause for concern in the budget cap era by racking up hefty repair bills. Heading into year two, Zhou was expected to do two things; keep doing what he was doing in 2022, but do it faster.
Although he was not among the most outstanding performers on the grid this season, Zhou was, again a professional if unspectacular performer. Sadly for both him and Bottas, the C43 was never as potent as its predecessor had been in the first half of his rookie season and points came few and far between over the course of the year.
Without the car in which to make a splash in the top half of the field, Zhou’s improvement over his second season was best measured in how much better he matched his more experienced team mate over the year. Although Bottas out-qualified him more frequently, Zhou spent almost half the racing laps in the season running as the lead Alfa Romeo driver and beat Bottas to the chequered flag twice as frequently as he had as a rookie.
There were a handful of genuinely strong weekends from the 24-year-old. Most notably the second round of the season in Jeddah, where he outperformed Bottas across the weekend and overcame slow pit stops and a poorly timed Safety Car to pass several cars in the later laps. Although he was still out of the points in 13th, it was easy to overlook how good a job he had done with the car he had. The next round in Melbourne, he secured his first points of the season by avoiding the chaos at the final restart to cross the line in tenth, then was promoted to ninth thanks to Carlos Sainz Jnr’s post-race time penalty.
Barcelona saw more points after another solid performance over the weekend. Again the quicker of the two Alfa Romeos, Zhou had a very good start and looked like a veteran on his hard tyres, finishing ninth thanks to a penalty once again – this time for Tsunoda.
Unfortunately, Alfa Romeo began to struggle to keep pace with the teams…
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