Guanyu Zhou is making his debut in a Ferrari today. Although the Chinese driver has been the Reserve Driver for the Scuderia since the start of the season—working alongside Antonio Giovinazzi in that role and contributing to the development of the SF-25 in the simulator—he had not yet had the chance to get behind the wheel of a Ferrari F1 car.
The 26-year-old from Shanghai has been on track this morning at Fiorano to carry out testing with Pirelli’s 2026 wet-weather tyres using the Ferrari SF-25 prepared by the Maranello team for tyre testing with the new dimensions and a simulated aerodynamic load close to that expected for the upcoming agile-spec single-seaters.
In the morning, the 3 km track was artificially soaked, despite the sunny day and temperatures expected to peak at 32 degrees, to allow the SF-25 to run with full wet and intermediate prototype tyres in front of Pirelli technicians from Bicocca who are trialling solutions for next season. Before starting on the wet compounds, Guanyu Zhou completed a run on slick tyres to establish a setup baseline for comparison.
The work will continue tomorrow with Charles Leclerc: the Monegasque has made himself available to get a feel for next year’s rain tyres, while it is well known that Lewis Hamilton is generally averse to testing.
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