The Manor F1 Team are confident that they will be able to participate fully when round two of the 2015 Formula 1 season gets underway in Malaysia in two weeks time.
After being forced to sit out all the sessions in Australia last weekend when they had to set-up their software for all the various systems onboard their modified 2014 Marussia car, Manor CEO Graeme Lowdon is expecting the team to be able to take to the track at Sepang.
Talking to Autosport, Lowdon said: “We made a lot of progress in Australia, and late on Friday we made some big step changes, so that has given everyone a lot of confidence that we are nearly there.
“Obviously, we ran out of time in Australia but the confidence levels are pretty high that things should be a lot more normal by the time we get to Kuala Lumpur.”
The FIA investigated the Manor team following the qualifying session in Australia, with the governing body querying why neither Will Stevens nor Roberto Merhi took to the track.
However, the team were able to prove to the FIA that they had arrived at Albert Park with the intention of running on track, and as such were not punished, and despite there still work to be done, Lowdon does not foresee as many problems surfacing in Malaysia.
“The cars themselves are mechanically complete, so people can’t see something physical, and they think that it looks complete so why can it not move?” said Lowdon.
“But there has been a succession of issues; earlier in the weekend they were straightforward, just trying to communicate with all of the systems before we started getting things to work.
“It was a tremendous effort from the guys and we have everyone we need to get these things solved, so I’m confident there’s a route map to getting it done.
“It’s not easy to see from the outside just how much effort is going in because we didn’t run. But there was nothing to gain from us not running in Australia.
“The cars go directly to Malaysia from Australia, so you don’t have the advantage of a two-week gap that you would in Europe, when you can get the cars back. So we won’t get access to the cars again until we are in the garages in Malaysia.
“But if we continue at the rate we are going at, things should be a lot more ‘business as usual’ there.”
