At Formula One’s inaugural Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai in 2004, five-year-old Zhou Guanyu was in the stands cheering on his idol, Spain’s Fernando Alonso.
(Bloomberg) — At Formula One’s inaugural Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai in 2004, five-year-old Zhou Guanyu was in the stands cheering on his idol, Spain’s Fernando Alonso.
Now, Zhou is competing against Alonso for Alfa Romeo, after he became China’s first full-time F1 racer last year. As one of the country’s rising sporting stars, Zhou has already attracted millions in sponsorship deals for global brands, and is also the key to helping F1 finally unlock the potential that the world’s second-largest economy holds.
“Formula One is basically my life, my world, my dream,” said Zhou at Alfa Romeo F1 Team’s factory in Hinwil, Switzerland during the long April break before the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku. “As a kid, that was the only dream that I wanted to achieve.”
F1 has struggled to resonate in China and lags far behind sports like basketball or football in popularity, due in part to a lack of motorsport history in the country and limited broadcast coverage. The cancellation of the Chinese Grand Prix for a fourth year in 2023 due to Covid further set F1 back, while Netflix Inc., whose Drive to Survive series has boosted the sport’s popularity around the world, isn’t available in China — though Zhou’s horrific crash at Silverstone last year features in it.
“When you get a Chinese person competing at the top level, it’s probably the quickest way to develop relevance and accelerate the fan base,” said Mark Thomas, managing director at a China-focused sport marketing consultancy S2M Consulting, who has been involved with motorsport in the country for two decades. “He’s a sponsor’s dream.”
China is already F1’s biggest market globally in terms of unique TV viewers, which reached over 70 million as of 2021, but that hasn’t necessarily translated into comparable revenues for the franchise. Its on-and-off partnership with the country’s state broadcaster limited its domestic reach and the country’s core fan base remains much smaller in size.
Meanwhile, for Chinese sponsors that want to go international, their top destinations are still soccer tournaments or the Olympics. Where China does have a stronger presence in motorsports is the all-electric Formula E series, with Beijing hosting its inaugural race in 2014 and NIO 333 Racing, a team managed by Chinese companies.
“To have a Chinese driver of such level is beneficial not only for our team but for the entire Formula One group,” said Alessandro Alunni Bravi, representative for Alfa Romeo F1 team. “Through Zhou, through our team, we can promote Formula One and the culture of Formula One in China.”
Blazing a Trail
While motorsports developed in Europe alongside the continent’s car makers as a platform for testing new technologies and projecting brand power, China did not have the same culture or infrastructure. The introduction of the Chinese Grand Prix was part of the Shanghai government’s plan to boost its auto industry and its global image, and the circuit was designed as a key part of an industrial park that today houses a world-class automobile industrial cluster.
Some see the potential for Zhou to do for motorsports what Yao Ming did for basketball in China, but Zhou arguably faces a tougher climb ahead. By the time Yao started playing in the National Basketball Association, the sport already had a large following in China thanks to groundwork laid by the league in the 1980s.
That meant Zhou very much had to blaze his own trail.
As a child, Zhou broke away from the usual path for children in China, where academic success is paramount and free time is often crammed with more studying. Growing up in Shanghai, he loved cars and fell in love with motorsport when his dad took him to an indoor go-kart track. He started karting, the entry-level activity into motorsports, at eight. His parents were supportive of his passion and Zhou would sometimes put school work aside on Fridays to travel to weekend races elsewhere in China.
According to local media reports, his dad had a professional karting track built for him as a gift in the northern province of Shandong so he could practice.
Around the same time, F1’s strong start in China had in fact begun to lose steam, with lackluster attendance at the Shanghai Grand Prix and stories of large-scale losses for F1’s local Chinese partner, a state-owned enterprise, triggering domestic debates over whether Shanghai should keep hosting the race.
Even as the sport struggled, the importance of China kept growing for F1 sponsors as its spending power surged and the country became the world’s largest auto market in 2009. But to pursue his racing dream, Zhou had to move overseas, where the best training infrastructure and most competitive racing environment were located. Zhou, who had broken many Chinese records already, wanted to follow his passion, and his family supported him.
At age 12, Zhou relocated to Sheffield in northern England with his family. While attending school there — speaking poor English at the start — he advanced his karting career with local team Strawberry Racing. He was often the only Chinese person on the track, but he quickly progressed in his race craft and also in his English proficiency.
Despite efforts to increase diversity and inclusion, F1 remains an exclusive sport today in gender and race. Only five women have competed in it, and the last to start in a race was Italian Lella Lombardi in 1976. Britain’s Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion, is still the only Black racer ever. Overall, the sport remains dominated by European drivers.
“We never thought one day there will be a Chinese driver on the grid. It is so difficult in this sport to arrive at Formula One,” said Zhou.
To reach F1 level, racers not only need talent and commitment, but also huge financial resources from family or sponsors. Hamilton once said his journey from a working-class background wouldn’t be possible today as the sport has become a “billionaire boys’ club.” The racing ladder starts with usually five to seven years of competitive karting, where young drivers build a strong foundation before working their way up to more competitive levels of racing in Europe, costing millions of dollars.
Return to Shanghai
Zhou’s F1 dream inched closer to reality when he joined the Ferrari Driver Academy in 2014 in Maranello, the home of the car maker. He climbed through Italian Formula Four, Euro Formula Three and Formula Two, where he switched to Renault’s young driver program. In 2021, he finished the season in third place of the F2 championship.
After joining F1 in 2022, he scored six points in his rookie season, including one on his debut race in Bahrain, and finished 18th out of 20.
Zhou described scoring a point on his debut race as one of his “happiest moments” in F1. Before the race, many questioned if he truly deserved a F1 driver seat.
“A lot of people were doubtful about me saying I won’t be fast, I’ll be last,” said Zhou. “I was just really focused. I knew I could do it. I knew I deserved to be there. So with the first race, I really changed people’s mind. That’s a nice moment.”
At Silverstone, he suffered a horrific crash at the first turn of the British Grand Prix, where his car hurtled upside down before hitting the barriers. Luckily, he escaped injuries.
“When you get to the Formula One Level, you don’t think about risks,” he said. “If you have to manage a risk, then you can be underperforming.”
This year, Zhou secured his first two points of the season at the Australian Grand Prix, putting him in 15th place. But that’s holding him back from garnering more attention from sponsors, said Tom Hoogendijk, marketing director for China at Infront Sports & Media AG.
“Right now he is competing in the middle or the back of the pack, which is very normal for someone who is in his second season, but that is not enough for most brands,” he said.
Zhou’s face now graces advertisements for brands including Christian Dior, Lululemon Athletica Inc. and HSBC Bank China Co. Ltd. on social media and billboards in Chinese cities. But he remains relatively low-profile, particularly when compared to Eileen Gu, the US-born, teenage freestyle skiing sensation who represented China at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and whose face can be seen everywhere in the country.
“In China, being number one is really important,” Hoogendijk added. “If Zhou wins one race, I think that will be enough to provoke brands signing sponsorship with him.”
Still, Zhou’s clean-cut image, together with his good looks and bilingual background, give him an edge over other Chinese athletes, particularly at a time when some of the country’s top sporting stars are embroiled in scandal, including table tennis Olympic champion Zhang Jike and female basketball player Li Meng.
While this season will be a crucial time for Zhou to prove himself as a newbie, the most pivotal moment of his career comes next year when the Grand Prix returns to Shanghai. The strength of the attendance figures will also be a key test for the sport’s popularity in China.
“We cannot wait any longer to come back to China,” said Alfa Romeo’s Bravi. “We cannot miss the opportunity to have all the Chinese fans becoming also motorsport fans, not just sports fans.”
Zhou, who wears his identity proudly with illustrations of Shanghai’s skyline and China’s national flag on his helmet, said that the resumption of the race in his home country “means the world” to him.
“I’m waiting for my turn,” he said. “When that happens, that is going to be one weekend to remember.”
–With assistance from Dayu Zhang.
(Updated with detail on Silverstone crash.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.