On the evening of September 9, Zhou Guanyu suddenly sent out an excited message on social media: "O! sharp! To give! On the morning of September 10, foreign media reported that Zhou Guanyu was expected to become the first official F1 driver in Chinese history, and Zhou Guanyu's team had promised Alfa Romeo Team that it would bring 30 million euros of sponsorship funds to let Zhou Guanyu replace Italian driver Antonio Giovinaz.
Since the beginning of the 2004 F1 China Grand General Race, There have been many F1 fans in China, but due to the lack of teams from China and official drivers from China, the sport's influence in China has always been limited. In the eyes of many fans and industry insiders, if there are Chinese teams and Chinese drivers who can appear on the field, the sport's influence in China will reach a new height.
Judging from Zhou Guanyu's attitude on social media and foreign media reports, he is indeed very hopeful that he will become an official F1 driver next year, and once it becomes a reality, he will become the first Chinese driver to participate in an official F1 race.
In this year's F2 competition, Zhou Guanyu has won the championship many times and is currently second in the standings, and it is not a problem to win an F1 super driver's license. However, foreign media mentioned that Zhou Guanyu's team will bring 30 million euros of sponsorship to the Alfa Romeo team, and the upstream news reporter saw that many netizens questioned whether he was spending money to "sell" the position, and "bringing funds into the group" also caused controversy.
Netizens who say that Zhou Guanyu brings funds into the group may not understand F1, every year there are only about 20 official driver positions in F1, which is a sport in which only a very small number of people can participate in official competitions, coupled with the huge cost of the team to participate in the race, "bringing funds into the group" is the norm in F1, and the professional name of this type of driver is "paid driver".
In F1, unless there is a talented driver like Hamilton, the vast majority of drivers have the experience of being a paid driver, such as Schumacher. Schumacher signed a driver's agreement before joining Jordan, which stated that Schumacher would sign a contract with the team in front of the Italian station to secure his driver's seat for the remainder of 1991 and 1992, as well as the price and payment of the driver's seat.
At the time, Schumacher was also a Mercedes factory driver, and his participation in F1 was priced at £150,000 per game in the 1991 season, and 3.5 million pounds a year for sponsorship for the next two years, and £150,000 per race was not a small number at that time.
In the eyes of F1 fans, if you spend 30 million euros to get a formal driver's seat, the cost performance is not low. Compared with the current F1 pay car owners of several rich second generations, this is already a very cheap sponsorship.
Ma Zeping, the Russian driver who played for Haas this year, is the second generation of the rich, in order to get a formal seat, his father once planned to buy a team for his son but did not succeed, he is also a paid driver of the team this year.
Fans believe that even if Zhou Guanyu joins F1 as a "paid driver", he can also drive the attention of F1 sports in China, which can also make other teams realize the value of Chinese drivers, so that more Chinese drivers can have the opportunity to enter the F1 arena.
Upstream journalist He Yan