Chinese Fan here！Thank you for using the right format of names of the two drivers, Zhou Guanyu and Ma Qinghua，but the name of ho-pin tong was actually Tong ho pin（董荷斌）However, due to the fact that few people knew the correct surname and arrangement of Chinese names before Zhou Guanyu entered F1, many Chinese drivers would use the format of foreigners (including Zhou Guanyu, many people also mistakenly sorted his name at the beginning of entering F1)Anyway, thank you very much for making this video！really enjoyed it！
@@Ramtamtama there are even drivers today who call him 'guanjo', namely nico rosberg in the chinese gp commentary, and charles leclerc in last years secret santa (which is weird, because theyve been friends for a long time)
Ho-Pin did a good job at Indy. He consistently faster than his teammate. The Dragon Racing cars weren't any good that year. Their other entry ended in a similar wreck on bubble day. An important note is that 2011 was final year for IR-05 chassis. Teams were offering discounts on the cost of single entry since they were getting rid of the cars anyway. That ended with arrival of the DW12
Looking at his record on Wikipedia it seems alright. German F3 champion, a couple of class wins at Le Mans, a podium at Monaco in F2. It's not the record of a forgotten genius who could have been a multiple F1 world champion, but it's certainly not the CV of a useless pay-driver either. He seems like a perfectly solid, decent driver who's found his niche in sports cars and had some success there, so hats off to him. Could he have had more success in IndyCar? Maybe, as you say that concussion stopping him from starting the 500 and therefore setting out his stall at the biggest event on the calender probably killed any chance of that, which is a shame.
As he is dutch, I have followed his racing career a bit, and he is a pretty nice guy and a decent driver. He did OK in GT and finished 2nd in class at LeMans.
I got his autograph in an IndyCar driver session in 2011. They had all 40 drivers attempting to make the 500 that year. The drivers were from the GOATS (Dario, Dixon, Wheldon, Kanaan) to well like veterans (Wilson, Servia, John Andretti, Buddy Rice) to young guns (Hinch, Graham Rahal, Marco, Hildebrand) and even more I could mention. if it was wasn't for that deep of a field he was going against, he might have made the race...
Thank you so much for this type of content! Short and informative. Focusing around the main topic and not digging too deep into the early career. Well done mate
They thought it'd be good publicity to have a Chinese driver. Then they found out he couldn't speak Mandarin (or any other Chinese language), so he couldn't do the PR that was the main reason they'd hired him...
@@nataliew5251I feel like that should be one of the first questions you should ask in an interview for a multinational sport. "What languages are you fluent in?"
I remember watching him in GP2 and A1GP. He also did some F1 testing back in the late 2000s; it looked like he could have been the first Chinese F1 driver for a while. That was a great period for open wheel racing as a whole for me.
Theres a video posted by Hagerty 4 days ago on youtube that features an incredible underground garage of extremely rare JDM cars and one of the garages zooms in on some Asian Le Mans trophies for OAK Racing in LMP3 in which they won 1st place for all 4 races and i dont know if they were owned by Ho-Pin Tung or by one of his teammates David Cheng or Yuan Bo but it was one of those weird things were he mentioned Ho-Pin Tung and i was like “i know i JUST googled this extremely obscure driver for some reason”
I vaguely recall him dnqing at Indy (don’t think I watched quali though) but have no recollection of him actually being in a race I saw on telly. Must have made a lasting impression upon me!
Although your lesser F1 drivers going to Indycar is certainly a thing, I doubt Zhou is the next Chinese Indycar driver. His driving style and vibe suggests that WEC and/or Formula E is more likely, especially since Formula E has had a race in China in most of its seasons. I honestly don't forsee there being another for a while.
Yep. He maintains a Chinese racing license but technically he is from Netherlands with a dutch nationality. One fun fact is that he couldn't speak chinese well tbh.
Maybe its fully in my head or I have no idea how Indycar works, but the way his car was fine them completely lost it looked more like some sort of mechanical failure than bad droving per se.
Watch the crash again and keep your eye on his left front tire. It crossed the white painted line and at those speeds that minor loss of grip is enough to upset the car.
i doubt it was even a mechanical issue. looking at it again, and rewatching the pole day upload, i'm pretty sure the wind might've had something to do with it, if there was gusts in turn 1 going 90 degrees to the left compared to the direction of the corner. i'll rewatch the pole day footage real quick and edit this if i need to，to confirm or unconfirm that.
Pretty shame that the Qingdao(tsingtao)street race in China never made it out of PPT, otherwise it would made quite a difference for American motorsport's publicity in China. Also, one fun fact is that Ho-Pin Tung couldn't even speak fluent Mandarin, but still remained one of the best driver with Chinese racing license for a long time.
I remember seeing his accident from the turn 2 grandstands and me being a naive little git thought that it was a smart idea to walk over to the medical center in the hopes of meeting him and getting an autograph after he was released. Needless to say, I didn't realize how bad of a hit it was and decided against getting an autograph after about 30 minutes of waiting.
The number 8 didn't bring him the luck he deserved. Chinese people really do get behind their own drivers, though. The Chinese Grand Prix looks like a sell-out and the roars whenever Zhou is featured are... loud.
