In 2022, Valtteri Bottas arrived at the Alfa Romeo-branded Sauber team looking to forge a new career path in Formula 1 after being dropped by front-runners Mercedes.
Meanwhile Zhou Guanyu arrived in Formula 1 seeking to establish himself as a grand prix driver. But three years on both find themselves without race drives for next season.
Arguably, both drivers failed to exceed expectations of how they would perform in order to convince either their current team to keep them or another to hire them.
Bottas, a 10-times grand prix winner, came to Alfa Romeo having just helped Mercedes win the constructors’ championship for the eighth year in a row. The early signs were promising: He started his first race for his new team on the third row alongside former team mate Lewis Hamilton.
The 49 points Bottas scored in 2022 was considerably more than his predecessors managed. But the team’s form has dipped since then.
Zhou, meanwhile, scored the same number of points in his first two seasons: six. Given how much less competitive the team was in 2023, this reflected some progress on Zhou’s part. During that time his share of the team’s points rose from around a tenth to more than a third.
That trend continued in 2024 when Zhou was the team’s only points-scorer, but made just a single appearance in the top 10, picking up four points. Those came on one of the team’s most competitive weekends of the year, in Qatar, when Bottas was delayed by a collision with Liam Lawson.
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But though Zhou’s improvement was discernible, he never consistently overcame his more experienced team mate, and his ejection from the grid after three years doesn’t look like an injustice. He finished behind Bottas more often than not this year. The qualifying battle was more one-sided than ever at 19-4, though that may partly reflect the days on which only Bottas had Sauber’s latest upgrades.
It’s not difficult to see why Sauber chose not to retain Zhou, and the same is true for Bottas. Over three years, he finished ahead of Zhou two times to one. Had the team’s performance not gradually declined over that period, the rookie’s points haul would have looked more impressive, though even then it wouldn’t have made an obvious case for Zhou deserving a fourth season.
Bottas vs Zhou, 2022-24
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Zhou’s performance…
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