Graeme Lowdon: Manor is slowly rebuilding itself
The sporting director of Manor believes that the team is rebuilding more quickly than they had anticipated. He hopes that the motivation and talent of his staff will make the difference in the coming months.
During the winter off-season, the Manor team was close to bankruptcy; now it hopes to further develop. For this purpose, it has hired Bob Bell, a former member of Mercedes, as a technical consultant. The Briton is now working closely with Luca Furbatto, the chief designer, and Gianluca Pisanello, the chief engineer.
In the coming weeks, the team will strengthen the technical and engineering fields. Recently, Manor recruited former GP2 champion Fabio Leimer as a reserve driver and placed Jordan King, another GP2 driver, as a development driver for the rest of the season.
However, the team’s start to the year has been far from ideal, as they did not conduct pre-season testing in Spain. Then, they did not field their cars at the first Grand Prix in Australia. But despite these chaotic beginnings, optimism is prevalent within the English team, according to their sporting director, Graeme Lowdon: « We are in a position where we are rebuilding the team. In terms of technical structure, we have been fortunate to have had a number of people who were with us in the past and who rejoined us quite quickly at the beginning of the season. I think we have a very effective technical team that has worked tremendously hard on the 2015 car. »
The leader of Manor is aware that rebuilding the team for the long term will be very difficult; he hopes that his staff will make a huge difference in development over the year: « Obviously, our development has been interrupted and we are now in a phase that is quite unusual, namely rebuilding things while looking at the most adequate strategy. We do not want to be focused on day-to-day problems. Bob [Bell] is a person who emphasizes the image and strategy for the future. Luca [Furbatto] is a person with enormous experience; he will strengthen the design area with Gianluca [Pisanello]. We are in a very important period of reconstruction. We hope to achieve this quickly ».
