With Mercedes power and a Williams transmission on their side, Manor were supposed to take Formula One by storm this year, with multiple point finishes in sight.

Despite a somewhat promising start to the new season, reality soon began to set in as the team has yet to score any points. Their best result thus far has been P13 in Bahrain where Pascal Wehrlein drove the wheels off his car, setting the 5th fastest time of the race session.

Since then, it’s been a constant struggle as Force India, Toro Rosso, McLaren and Haas have cemented their status as middle of the pack teams, with Renault and Sauber bottoming out ahead of Manor.

Sauber is the only other team that has yet to score points in 2016, though by the looks of things, their chances seem to be a great deal better. Does this mean Manor should tank the rest of the 2016 season and focus primarily on their ’17 car? According to racing director Dave Ryan, 2016 isn’t lost just yet.

Ryan spoke with Autosport recently saying that “at the moment we’ve work ongoing on the ’17 car. 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.”

He then went on to say that his outfit is 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. 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.”

Sure enough, surpassing the performance of last year’s Marussia car (or any other past Marussia car, aka Virgin Racing car) wouldn’t be difficult at all since the team has never scored a point in Formula 1 regardless of what it called itself. Ryan also believes his rookie drivers (Wehrlein & Haryanto) are doing everything they can in terms of extracting performance from the car.

“We have got the same engine as Mercedes and look how quick they are,” said the Manor exec. “Although Williams didn’t look too shiny around Monaco, even though they picked up their first points there for a while, again we’ve the same back end as them. So the rest of it is just the car and the drivers, and I have to say the drivers are doing a really good job. I can’t fault them at all.”

If Ryan’s optimism pays off, with a bit of luck, Manor’s Mercedes power and Williams tech might help them do what they’ve never been able to achieve in the past – secure a top 10 finish under the current rules of F1.

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