Yu Chu Chin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
On April 21, 2024, Zhou Guanyu started his first home Formula 1 race at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai, becoming the first Chinese driver ever to race in his own national Grand Prix. It was not a podium day, but it was still one of the most significant personal and symbolic milestones of the weekend.
Formula 1’s return to Shanghai finally gave Zhou the moment that had been missing from the first part of his career. He had already become China’s first F1 race driver when he debuted in 2022, but the Chinese Grand Prix had been absent from the calendar until 2024. That meant his home debut arrived later than it should have done, and when it came, it carried obvious weight.
Guanyu Zhou
- Races (starts):68
- Wins:0
- Podiums:0
- Pole positions:0
- Fastest laps:2
- Driver of the Day:1
- World titles:0
- Points (total):16
Data source: F1DB (GitHub)
The scale of the occasion was hard to miss. Reuters described chants of “Guanyu, Guanyu, Guanyu” around the Shanghai International Circuit, with tens of thousands of fans turning up to see the country’s first and only Formula 1 driver race at home for the first time. Even in a season where Sauber was struggling for results, Zhou was unmistakably one of the central figures of the event.
A milestone bigger than the finishing position
Zhou finished 14th in the Grand Prix, so the final result was modest in purely competitive terms. Formula 1’s official results record him 14th for Kick Sauber Ferrari at the China round on April 21, 2024, and Reuters’ race report says the same.
Liauzh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
But this was one of those days where position did not tell the full story. The significance was in the act of starting the race at all. For years, China had hosted Formula 1 without having a home driver on the grid. Zhou changed that more broadly in 2022, and in Shanghai in 2024 he completed the other half of the picture by becoming the first Chinese driver to take the start in the Chinese Grand Prix itself.
A local driver for the crowd
The Chinese Grand Prix returned in 2024 after a five-year absence from the calendar, so Zhou’s home debut landed not in an ordinary race weekend, but in an event already carrying a sense of return and occasion. That gave the whole thing more emotional force than a standard home race debut might have had.
It also mattered beyond Zhou himself. Formula 1 has long viewed China as a major market, but there is a difference between staging a race in a country and having that country properly represented on the grid. Zhou’s presence gave Shanghai something it had never had before: a local driver for the crowd to attach itself to directly, rather than as part of a vague commercial growth story.
So April 21, 2024 stands up as a proper landmark in Chinese Formula 1 history. Zhou Guanyu did not win, and he did not score points, but he did something no Chinese driver had done before him: start the Chinese Grand Prix. For Shanghai, for local fans and for Formula 1’s long courtship of China, that was a meaningful moment all by itself.
