“It’s a weekend to leave behind,” says Zhou on a frustrating opening round

In the aftermath of celebrating his second Formula 2 pole, by a mega margin of 0.4s, it probably wouldn’t have crossed Guanyu Zhou’s mind that those would be the last points he’d take all weekend, and yet, that’s how it played out for the luckless UNI-Virtuosi racer.

Last season’s highest finishing rookie is still searching for his first win in the Championship and came agonizingly close to securing it in the Feature Race, only for mechanical issues to strike.

“It’s definitely a weekend to leave behind,” he summarised. “After a positive start before the two races, to come out with no points is definitely not ideal, but we will take the positives and move forward.”

The Chinese racer had been running in first for the majority of the race, but lost power after his pit stop and was forced to return for a fix just a few laps later. By the time he got back out on track, his race was all but over.

His luck didn’t improve on Sunday either. Jehan Daruvala tagged Luca Ghiotto and sent the Italian spinning on track. Zhou was forced wide in his attempts to avoid the Hitech car and ended up dropping to the back of the pack.

“The win came close last year,” he continued “This year it has come even closer, but I think that I am really confident to say that in future races, if I don’t have any problems, then a win will be mine.

“That is how it was this weekend though and there was nothing that I could do. I think that throughout the whole weekend I have done the best I could, and next weekend I will continue working as hard as I can to get some good points back.”

The issues suffered will have left the British team with plenty to mull over in the coming days, but pace will not be one of those. Alongside his teammate Callum Ilott, who went on to win the Feature Race, UNI-Virtuosi were unmistakably the quickest cars on the grid.

With the paddock remaining at the Red Bull Ring for Round 2, where the team have already proven themselves to be strong, Zhou will envisage more success.

“To be racing here again is good,” he explained. “I had quite a bad first weekend, not speed wise, but with luck and with the issues we had, so it will be nice to be back racing again just a week later. I can forget all of the bad stuff that happened before and continue working hard.

“We had a good baseline car for the Red Bull Ring, so having two races here is definitely a good thing for us. It will be quite a big challenge, because all of the teams will improve from last weekend, but we are still confident that we will have a good enough car to put us at the front for the races.

“I am really happy for Callum {Ilott} to take his first win though. It is good for the team, and proves that we had a good car, with good race pace as well as qualifying pace.”