Manor: Melbourne presence vital despite issues

Graeme Lowdon has claimed that it was essential for Manor to attend the Australian Grand Prix despite lingering doubts over the team’s actual ability to take to run at all this weekend.

Both Will Stevens and Roberto Merhi were confined to the garage in free practice as the ex-Marussia team struggled with a raft of issues, including software glitches on last year’s Ferrari power units.

Asked whether the team should have skipped the opening round to have a better shot in Malaysia, Lowdon argued that coming to Melbourne was the best option.

“I think it’s really important to be here,” said the Manor CEO. “This is the championship that we’re part of, and we want to be part of it from the start, right the way through to the finish. I think for those who have seen the task that the team has addressed, it has been an incredible job by an awful lot of people.

“The cars and the systems are incredibly complicated and what’s been achieved in an incredibly short space of time – the company only came out of administration two weeks ago – has really been tremendous. We’re racers and we want to race. That’s what we want to do.”

Meanwhile, Lowdon also acknowledged that it remained unclear whether Manor would be able to get on top of its problems in time and actually turn a wheel in anger this weekend.

“I honestly don’t know (if we will run). But what I can guarantee you is, in terms of commitment and rate of problem solving, we’ll be absolutely flat-out maximum.

“It’s not simply a software issue, there are a lot of issues, none of which are a big surprise really when you consider what’s been required to get the team here in a very, very short space of time. So I would say that the problems that we are dealing with at present are not unusual for the task we are doing, which is effectively setting up trackside and on-car infrastructure for these cars to run.

“We’ll put our best effort in and deal with each problem sequentially and try to get through them as quickly as we can and try to get running as quickly as we can."

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