'Brilliant' Ocon impresses Ryan at start of Manor career

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Manor racing director Dave Ryan has described Esteban Ocon as "brilliant" having been impressed with the Frenchman in his first two races.

Ocon replaced Rio Haryanto over the summer, with Mercedes keen to see what the 19-year-old could do alongside fellow young driver Pascal Wehrlein. Ocon qualified 18th at Spa-Francorchamps and finished 16th in the race, but missed out in qualifying at Monza as an electrical problem stopped him for the second time in the weekend.

“Clearly we let Esteban down in Monza," Ryan said. "The kid’s brilliant. The kid for sure is going to be very, very good - he is already very, very good - but like anything until we have a car under him that he can demonstrate his abilities then we’ve got to wait and see, but he’s not put a foot wrong since he’s been with us.”

With Pascal Wehrlein failing to finish in Monza due to an oil leak when running competitively, Ryan admits Manor missed an opportunity for a strong result in Italy.

“Absolutely. Monza was our worst weekend for reliability for some time... well, period. To have Esteban stop with the same problem twice is not acceptable, is it? So we need to get on top of that, stop it now and look forward to the rest of the season really.

“Spa was a good race, we did well at Spa. Pascal had a clean run and his qualifying performances have been superb, so Spa was a good race for him, a very good race. Monza was a missed opportunity, for sure."

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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.