Manor can fight to hold P12 - Ryan

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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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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.