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Manor has made ‘unbelievable progress’ - Booth

Manor team principal John Booth has described his team’s progress since the start of the season as “unbelievable”.

With Marussia having entered administration after last year’s Russian Grand Prix, the team was revived as Manor in February and managed to prepare a 2015-spec car to travel to the Australian Grand Prix, though it was not ready to run. However, the team raced in Malaysia and at every round since, going on to add strength to its technical team in June and even introducing updates to its car at Silverstone.

Speaking exclusively to F1i, Booth says the improvements within all areas of the team have surprised even himself.

“It’s just unbelievable progress,” Booth said. “We are where we are and we’re not going to be fighting for position, but it was really rewarding to put the upgrade on at Silverstone. It did everything that the guys said it would do, which was really rewarding.

“We’re now building up a really good technical team back at base with Bob [Bell], Luca [Furbatto], John McQuilliam of course and Tim Milne. We’re getting a really good technical base together. We’ve been back in the wind tunnel for a month now with the 2016 car, so it’s actually all coming together, amazingly.”

And while all F1 teams take part in a mandatory two week factory shutdown, Booth says Manor is pressing ahead with plans to move in to a new factory by the end of next month.

“We’ve got a new factory to move in to by the end of September. The builders have moved in to fit it out in Banbury, so that will keep us occupied and then we will look forward to the flyaways.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.