Formula 1: veteran Alfa Romeo driver Robert Kubica says Zhou Guanyu ‘deserves to be’ in the sport
- Teams head to Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend for the final round of the championship before the summer break
- The race will be a chance for Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu to get back in the points and head into the holidays with positive momentum
Formula 1 returns to Budapest for the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend – the final race before drivers take a well-earned summer break from what has been a grinding, testing season.
For Zhou Guanyu, China’s first F1 driver, it will be a chance to refocus after a rookie season that has gone from the highs of a point in his first race to several forced retirements in others.
“He’s been quite unlucky,” Kubica told the Post. “But to be honest, I think from a technical driver’s point of view, he’s doing a solid job. He deserves to be in Formula One. The confidence is there. He’s not making mistakes and he has the car – this is a very important combination.”
A member of the Alfa Romeo F1 set-up since 2020, Kubica acknowledged that the team had had its fair share of car troubles this year, but believes it is now in a stronger position than many of their F1 counterparts – especially in dealing with the issue of porpoising, or the bouncing of cars as a result of new F1 regulations.
“Of course we have faced, as all teams have in this modern Formula One, the issue of porpoising,” he said. “But what we can build on is performance. We have to keep developing and we have to keep working on the car from a reliability point of view, but also from a performance point of view.”
Kubica believes the new regulations have given designers and engineers significant room to implement sweeping innovations in 2022.
