Despite some focus being turned to the development of their 2017 Mercedes-powered challenger, Manor Racing are still eager to develop their 2016 MRT05 so they can find out more about its characteristics.
Despite the perennial back-markers once again being at the back of the field in 2016, the gap to those in front has reduced significantly, and on occasion the drivers have found themselves ahead of some of their rivals.
Racing director Dave Ryan believes it is important the team look deeper into how the 2016 car works and what needs improving so they can further improve their 2017 effort straight from the box.
“At the moment we’ve work ongoing on the ’17 car,” said Ryan to Autosport. “I’m sure that’s the same for everyone, although ours is perhaps not as much as some of the bigger teams in terms of percentage of effort.
“But we are still working hard on the ’16 car because we need to understand what we’ve got, and we need to extract what we can out of it for this year.
“We owe it to our drivers to give them the best car we can, and none of us just want to sit around and say ‘That’s it’, pack up and wait around for next year. If you do that then you end up nowhere.
“Can we learn anything from this year’s car? Yeah, we can learn a huge amount. It’s a great car. Relative to what we’ve had [in the past], it’s superb.”
