Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsManor

Manor doesn't want to be a big team - Ryan

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Manor sporting director Dave Ryan says the team wants to remain as a small outfit in F1.

A power unit supply coupled with a technical partnership with Williams has resulted in Manor showing a clear improvement in terms of competitiveness this pre-season having been comfortably the slowest team last year with an old car.

Ryan says the tight pre-season schedule of only two tests will be difficult for Manor, but he says expanding to a bigger size would be detrimental to the way the team works.

“It’s a massive challenge," Ryan said. "We’re the smallest team by a big margin, and we do a lot ourselves. Obviously we get things made for us. But if you look at the number of people we have here. If someone goes sick then we will struggle a bit.

“We have a nightshift, but we only have two crews of people at the moment, so we are spreading ourselves pretty thin, but that’s where we want to be. The problem is if we start getting too many people too soon before we are ready for them then it will slow us down, so we need to stay tight and mobile.

“We’re never going to be a big team, we don’t want to be a big team – we’ll say that now. We’ll stay a small team, but we want to be efficient and to get good value out of what we have. That’s our goal.”

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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.