The Cadillac F1 team confirmed the addition of Zhou Guanyu as its reserve driver ahead of the 2026 season.
Guanyu left his role as a reserve driver for Ferrari last week, and his name was almost immediately tied to the same role as Cadillac joins the grid this year. Zhou will reunite with former Sauber teammate Valtteri Bottas, who will pair with fellow Formula 1 veteran Sergio Perez as the team’s full-time drivers.
Zhou made his F1 debut with Sauber in 2022 and drove alongside Bottas for three years, making 68 career starts from 2022-24.
“We spoke a lot,” Zhou told F1.com about Bottas. “We spent a lot of time (together), even when we were in different teams over the course of last year, so the three years I spent (in F1 were) really together with Valtteri.”
Guanyu, 26, is a Shanghai native and the only Chinese driver to race full-time in F1.
Guanyu did not enter a race for Ferrari, whose primary drivers in 2025 were Charles Leclerc of Monaco and Lewis Hamilton of Great Britain.
Guanyu, an alumnus of the Ferrari Driver Academy, was the 2021 Asian regional champion and proceeded to win Autosport’s Rookie of the Year award in his maiden F1 season. He acknowledged that the transition to being a reserve driver has been difficult.
“It’s challenging in terms of the mental side, just because you’re watching all the people that are racing, and some of them you have battled with or you’ve beaten them throughout the years,” he said. “You want to be there, and you feel like you deserve to be on the grid fighting with them together. So that’s probably the hard side, on the mental side, and when you’re just watching the race.
“Then on the other side, I don’t feel it’s such a bad position, because while I was able to take a step down from a race seat over the 2025 season, I really felt the stuff I wasn’t on the top performance level of, the stuff I would do differently if I go back on the grid again in the future.”
–Field Level Media
