Excited to have him on grid: Aston Martin on Guanyu Zhou

The addition of Chinese driver Guanyu Zhou, according to Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullogh, is a huge boost for Formula One. Zhou, 22, has joined Alfa Romeo for the upcoming season, making him the first Chinese driver in Formula One history. And McCullogh is confident that his inclusion in the competition will only benefit the sport and its global appeal.

“It’s fantastic every time we see a driver coming from a different nationality. It just opens the eyes of the people in those countries who maybe don’t necessarily watch Formula One or weren’t as interested in the Formula One,” he told CGTN.

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‘Excited to have him’

“Formula One is a growing sport. China is a huge emerging market for Aston Martin, and yeah, really excited to have him join the grid and he’s had a great career so far up to this point and I’m sure at that team, he is going to have a very, very good year.”

The Aston Martin director was speaking at the launch of the team’s new car for 2022, which he admits was difficult to design due to the upcoming season’s rule changes. “The rulebook has been ripped up, totally starting again. We’ve designed what we think is the best interpretation. We could only start at the start of January last year from a regulation side of things and we had a year to design and develop and evolve the car that you see today.”

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“But we’ve had nine other teams with very smart people at all those teams trying to do the same thing as well. So it’s going to be exciting seeing everybody’s interpretation of a totally new set of rules. In previous years. It’s just been an evolution. There’s going to be looking at each other to see what other people have done, how they’ve interpreted the rules. And I think, you know, as the season progresses.”