Haryanto notes mechanical progress at Manor

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Rio Haryanto says Manor made progress with its mechanical set-up during the in-season test at Silverstone which should help it at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

After the high of Pascal Wehrlein’s 10th place in Austria, Manor struggled throughout the British Grand Prix with both drivers retiring early in the race. However, the team focused on brakes and its cornering performance at low speed during the two days of testing this week which Haryanto believes yielded some encouraging results as it looks to defend its 10th place in the constructors’ championship from Sauber.

“We tried some new items in the car,” Haryanto said. “One of them is the brakes and that was part of different set-ups in the front. I think it was positive but the lap times weren’t really representative because we were running quite high fuel. It was more a case of having good feedback and good feeling with the new items.

“We made a step with the brakes. I thought the retardation was better so I think we will take these forward for the next event. The set-up of the car was helping me a lot in the slow corners and again Budapest has a lot of slow corners. Mechanically it’s a step forward for us.”

Having spun out of the British Grand Prix in wet conditions on Sunday, Haryanto was also glad to be able to carry out some wet running this week to analyse where he can improve.

“At the beginning [took it easy] but then as I built the confidence back up it was OK … I think having similar circumstances from Sunday to [Tuesday] it was good to work from the race and have the same sort of conditions again. That was productive.”

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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.