Zhou satisfied with debut year: 'Have met goals'

The points difference was huge. While his experienced teammate Valtteri Bottas scored 49 points, Guanyu Zhou got 'just' six championship points. It suggests that the Chinese was significantly outclassed, but that does not tell the full story.

Of course, in Bottas, Zhou has a teammate who is much more experienced, so it makes sense that he was not able to immediately outshine the Finn. After all, it was only the first season in Formula 1 for the Alfa Romeo driver, so he had to get used to everything: the cars, the circuits, the pressure of the sport. Moreover, Zhou had some bad luck (as had Bottas), as his car was not exactly reliable. Alfa Romeo often had DNF's, often related to a broken Ferrari engine.

0.2 seconds

Overall, Zhou had a stable year, in which he was on average 0.2 seconds slower than Bottas during qualifying. The Chinese hardly made big mistakes. He did have some problems with his starts, though that was partly due to the car. The Alfa Romeo had a lot of excess weight, which often made it difficult to get off the line well. All in all, Zhou himself is satisfied after his debut year, he revealed to The Race.

"We could achieve a bit more on paper without the reliability issues, especially in the first part of the season when Valtteri was scoring points and I really felt both cars could be in the points on a few occasions. But on top of that I had up and down moments, maybe some mistake at the beginning with the anti-stall understanding. But I’m happy we achieved the targets, and overachieved to be in Q3,” Zhou said.