Alejandro Del Rey will take a one-stroke lead into the second round of the Volvo China Open after carding a 61 at Enhance Anting Golf Club on Thursday.
It was a stellar performance from the Spaniard, whose near-faultless round featured highlights aplenty to set the initial target at 10-under par in Shanghai.
The 28-year-old opened his account off the tenth tee in style, managing an eagle on his first hole and a birdie at the 13th. His only blemish of the day came at the following hole, a stretch of six birdies in seven holes across the turn more than offsetting any damage.
Del Rey picked up another two shots on his way home to sit atop the leaderboard, one shot ahead of local favourite Yanhan Zhou.
“It was great,” said Del Rey. “I definitely didn’t see it coming at the beginning of the round. It’s a tough course, and you have to play well, and I guess we got a little bit lucky with the rain yesterday – it helped, because Monday, the greens were really, really firm. We were a little bit worried how it was going to play out throughout the week. It’s just a very nice round. Everything felt like it was flowing pretty nicely and I just let one of those low ones come out.
“The course, it’s demanding out of every part of the game, so I guess everything worked really well. Driving was very good. It’s been fairly good throughout the year, and I was just happy to see that it’s still there after six weeks off.
“I took it as like an off-season, we would call it, and go out there back home, get into the gym quite a bit, practice what I thought I had to work on. The winter break is not as long as I would like, so I thought it was a great time of the year to actually do an off-season and work on stuff I wanted to work on.”
Rising star Zhou came out firing in his national open, registering six birdies, four of which were consecutive, on his front nine, with an eagle on the tenth further spurring on the home crowd. He added another birdie at the 12th before navigating windy conditions to finish strongly.
This week marks Zhou’s first Volvo China Open since earning his DP World Tour card, with his previous two appearances coming via opportunities on the China Tour.
South Africa’s Shaun Norris was the next best of the afternoon groups, carding a bogey-free 63 to reach eight-under par, while Austria’s Bernd Wiesberger sits one shot behind in outright fourth, followed by China’s Bowen Chai.
Past champion Adrian Otaegui was in a group at five under alongside England’s Andrew Johnston, Australia’s Kuangyu Chen and Canadian Aaron Cockerill.
Round one was suspended at 6:32pm local time due to darkness and will resume at 7:45am on Friday morning.
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