The Manor cars of Will Stevens and Roberto Merhi failed to leave the team's garage in Melbourne on Friday, and the likelihood is that they won't run on Saturday either.
The team blamed lack of correct software for its troubles, along with other issues linked to the last minute preparation of the cars – which nevertheless had passed scrutineering.
“It’s not simply a software issue, there are a lot of issues,” said team CEO Graeme Lowdon. “None of which are a big surprise really when you consider what’s been required to get the team here in a very, very short space of time.
“So I would say that the problems that we are dealing with at present are not unusual for the task we are doing, which is effectively setting up trackside and on-car infrastructure for these cars to run. We’ll put our best effort in and deal with each problem sequentially and try to get through them as quickly as we can and try to get running as quickly as we can.”
Regarding future challenges he said: “We literally have to deal with the problems one at a time and I think as we steadily get through them we’ll be able to put a little bit more accuracy on any kind of prediction. At the moment it’s quite difficult to predict as you have binary problems – things are either going to work or they’re not going to work.
“But what I’m confident about is that we are not seeing anything that’s unusual, just things that have to be dealt with in a very short space of time and also once these problems are solved we wouldn’t expect to see them again.”
Lowdon insisted that it was better to be in Australia rather than work on the car at home.
“I think it’s really important to be here. This is the championship that we’re part of, and we want to be part of it from the start, right the way through to the finish. I think for those who have seen the task that the team has addressed, it has been an incredible job by an awful lot of people. Not just people within the team – but we’ve had huge amount of cooperation from all the other teams here, from the FIA, from Jean Todt, from FOM, from Bernie. It’s not a small task to do what’s been done and an awful lot of people have helped to get it to where it is.
“The cars and the systems are incredibly complicated and what’s been achieved in an incredibly short space of time – the company only came out of administration two weeks ago – has really been tremendous. We’re racers and we want to race. That’s what we want to do. There’s nothing that we’re doing that would possibly slow the process down.
“We want to be on the track as quick as we possibly can. As far as taking time to do a test or something like that, that would have been great but it was just impossible in the time that was available. We’ll keep pushing as hard as we can, together with all of our partners and I’m pretty sure we’ll be there sooner or later and then we can just move forward.”
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