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Ryan calls on Manor to improve qualifying

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Dave Ryan wants Manor to improve its qualifying performances to consistently race with the likes of Renault and Sauber.

After a poor start to the season in Australia, Manor enjoyed a competitive Bahrain Grand Prix but was not quite as strong last time out in China. While Pascal Wehrlein beat a Sauber, Haas and Renault - and Rio Haryanto also finished ahead of Jolyon Palmer - racing director Ryan believes qualifying is the key to doing so on a consistent basis.

“We’re not there yet," Ryan said when asked how pleased he is to be so close to Renault and Sauber. "We’re not there and we should be. I think we’ve shown glimpses of being able to run with them.

"It’s all track position … we saw in Bahrain if you can just get up amongst them at the starting point, you can race with them. So we’ve got to learn how to qualify better and then we can race with these guys. We have the capability, we’ve got the drivers and we’ve just got to learn how to get the best out of the car and out of us."

And Ryan believes some of the decision-making from Manor so far this season has also hurt its chances of better results.

"Some of the calls we made over [the China] weekend really, in hindsight you stand back and you could question them. Were they the right calls? And in some cases they really weren’t. Perhaps a bit of a decision here and there - by all of us collectively - and that doesn’t do it really, that’s not how we should be.

"We’ve all got a bit of work to do and once we can get all of that side of things working completely at 100% we’ll see the real potential of the guys and the team.”

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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.