Meet the primary and solely F1 driver from China, who's already notched offers with Dior and Lululemon

Zhou Guanyu is the primary Chinese language driver to compete in Method 1.

Zhou was born in Shanghai in 1990. He started racing when he was simply eight years previous, and, like most racing drivers, began out karting.

Based on state media The Paper, Zhou’s father constructed an expert karting monitor for him to apply racing, in Shandong province, round a two-hour flight away from Shanghai. Zhou’s father is a enterprise proprietor, in keeping with a November 2019 interview with Method 2.

Zhou moved to the UK along with his household in 2012 to kickstart his profession. He attended Westbourne School in Sheffield, about 170 miles north of London.

On the similar time, Zhou began racing with Strawberry Racing and competed in karting till 2014. Relocating abroad wasn’t simple for Zhou, as there have been so many variations between Shanghai and Sheffield.

“Shanghai is a big metropolis,” Zhou instructed Method 2 within the interview, including that rising up in Sheffield felt “small” in comparison with his hometown. The inhabitants of Sheffield is round  550,000, however Shanghai — China’s most populous metropolis — has virtually 30 million residents. 

Zhou mentioned that shifting to the UK “was an enormous change” as a result of he did not converse or perceive English, per the interview with Method 2.

“Within the colleges, there have been no different Chinese language individuals there, I used to be the one one they usually could not converse my language, so I needed to drive myself to study it shortly,” he continued. 

Zhou Guanyu’s agent didn’t instantly reply to Insider’s requests for remark.