🇨🇳 Cong Fu Cheng

Cong Fu Cheng is a Chinese racing driver who competed in the World Endurance Championship between 2012 and 2013, completing four starts for Rebellion Racing. His Racer Rating of 4,398 places him among professional competitors; this level describes drivers who front national championships or sharp fields in strong feeder series, and who beat semi-professionals comfortably. Cheng's career, however, tells a different story. He raced against the world's strongest endurance drivers: his four WEC starts put him in cars alongside Allan McNish, a driver rated 7,055 and among the elite of international motorsport; Benoît Tréluyer, Alexander Wurz, and Andre Lotterer, all rated above 5,800; and Tom Kristensen, at 5,728. Cheng did not finish ahead of any of these drivers across the fourteen races they shared.[1]

Cheng's finishes in classified races averaged sixth position, but this aggregate masks the gulf between him and his peers. In every one of his four shared races with the strongest drivers in his field, Cheng finished behind them. He did beat some strong professional drivers on single occasions: Bertrand Baguette, a Formula V8 3.5 champion and FIA Platinum graded; Takuma Sato and Karun Chandhok, both established professionals; and David Brabham, an FIA Silver graded driver. These isolated results in an endurance field, however, do not establish a competitive pattern against the elite. His most recent WEC appearance in 2013 left him in twenty-first position, and he has not raced since. Cheng's career represents an entry into top-tier endurance racing for a driver from an underrepresented racing nation, a distinction noted at the time, though his results against the world's best drivers never moved beyond the gap that separated them from the start.[2]