Manor’s Racing Director, Dave Ryan feels that the team’s unreliability is unacceptable in Formula 1; Esteban Ocon’s Italian Grand Prix was blighted by problems and with Pascal Wehrlein retiring on lap 26, leaving Ryan feeling frustrated.
Monza looked like a track where Manor could perform well and even score points, Wehrlein made it into Q2 but the German was forced to retire from the race with an oil leak while Ocon suffered an electronics problem.
Ryan spoke to Autosport about the team’s unreliability, “To be honest, our optimism was justified. Looking at Pascal’s performance at Spa, it was brilliant, and we genuinely believed we were in with a good shot at Monza to do well.
“Pascal’s lap to get him into Q2 was really good. Splitting the McLarens was nice, and we perhaps could have got ahead of both of them. But equally we had the disappointment of Esteban’s reliability issue, which was very disappointing. To have the same problem twice is not really acceptable at this level.
“That was the tone for the weekend, which put us on the back foot with Esteban. Then we went into the race, and Pascal was doing pretty well when we had another issue with him. That was our weekend really – not good enough.”
Former McLaren Sporting Director, Ryan hopes that Ocon’s electronics will be sorted before Manor head to Singapore even though he doesn’t know the exact problem was.
“It was a question of changing every single electronic component on the car, but we clearly didn’t change enough on Friday night, and so the same problem reoccurred on Saturday,” added Ryan.
“So we changed absolutely everything again, and the problem seems to have gone away – I hope it’s gone away. The car certainly did twice as many laps [in the race] as it did over the previous few days with no sign of the problem. Now we have to go back and look at those parts and do a really good forensic exercise on them to see where the problem was and understand why we couldn’t pinpoint it.
