Manor racing director Dave Ryan believes Pascal Wehrlein has the pace to fight to retain his starting position of 12th place in the Austrian Grand Prix.
Wehrlein produced an impressive performance on Saturday which led Mercedes boss Toto Wolff to describe him as "special" after reaching Q2 and securing a spot on the sixth row of the grid. Ryan says the car's race pace also looks strong at the Red Bull Ring and he's confident Manor will be able to fight with the cars around it.
"It is quite easy to overtake but you know the car’s been pretty good all weekend really, we had a fairly good long run," Ryan said. "It will be interesting. I think we go into [the race] reasonably positive, so we’ll see.
"We are at the right end of the grid, we’ve seen a lot of cars… There’s not much margin for error so yeah reasonably positive really. It’s been good so far, maybe it will continue."
Ryan also had praise for Wehrlein's performance as well as that of the team after equalling its best qualifying result.
"Yeah it was pretty good. Pascal did a good job and the team made some good calls. The car is pretty good here, a few other teams have had a few problems, but overall very, very happy with the result.
"We’re still learning a lot as a team, we’re really proud of the guys, they did some really good calls but it takes time working together properly and understanding what you can and cannot do. [In qualifying] we got it right but we’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way, we really have done."
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