How the 'original' Manor was reborn in LMP2

When last year's World Endurance Championship season kicked off at Silverstone in April, John Booth and Graeme Lowdon were in China running the Manor Formula 1 team.

This weekend, while F1 is in the far east, the duo will be helming a very different Manor operation.

The new Manor Endurance Racing squad will field two ORECA-Nissan 05s in the LMP2 class throughout this year's WEC (the Le Mans 24 Hours, where it drops to a single entry, excepted).

It has no connection to the team currently racing in F1, other than the two team bosses and a smattering of staff having moved from there, and can legitimately claim to be the 'true' Manor team in the sense that it is effectively a resurrection of the squad that enjoyed so much success in single-seater racing and then gave birth to the grand prix team.

So how did it all happen? Lowdon, a lover of sportscar racing and a Le Mans stalwart who first attended the race to see Jaguar's famous victory in 1990, traces the LMP2 team's origins in the uncertainty surrounding the then-Marussia F1 team in 2014 and what he calls its "well-documented business challenges".

This led to the team dropping off the grid later in the season and its phoenix-from-the-ashes act as Manor for 2015. But as part of that resurrection, both Lowdon and Booth lost any remaining equity in the team and became employees; employees destined to leave at the end of the season and determined to spend as little time out of racing as possible.

"Until the flag dropped in the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi - although like any employee you could think about your next move - we'd made a clear commitment to the team," says Lowdon.

"Then as soon as it was finished, it was a case of looking seriously at what to do next.

"I'd always been a fan of sportscar racing and I also had the advantage of going to last year's Bahrain [WEC] round. I've sat on many aeroplanes over the years with people involved in WEC and on one I sat next to Allan McNish, who said that if I ever wanted to come along to get in touch. So he provided an introduction with Audi.

"As soon as I walked into the paddock, you could tell it was a serious motor-race."

After Lowdon attended that race, which was a week before the F1 season finale, it was clear that WEC was the way to go for the Manor revival. And that inevitably meant LMP2.

"P2 was the obvious route," says Lowdon. "LMP1 is clearly designed for manufacturers and while that holds an interest for the future, there was no way we could pull a project like that together in time.

"LMP2 offered a number of advantages in terms of putting a new team together. We didn't have to spend time designing and manufacturing the car and it offered a world championship arena for us to compete purely as a racing team. So the decision was quick."

Then came the choice of chassis. Realistically, this boiled down to the ORECA 05 and the Onroak Automotive-produced Ligier JSP2. Both proven, competitive packages that would have served the team well, but ORECA got the nod.

"The quality of cars produced now in LMP2 is very high," says Lowdon.

"We'd had six years of experience in F1 and that's a good yardstick as to the quality of materials and processes, so we could see that straight away. So we had a choice of some high-quality manufacturers.

"Our choice had a lot to do with looking to see who could work with us quickly and give us a good level of support.

"For all the experience we have in motor-racing, the most important thing to recognise about moving into a new championship is to recognise everything is new. It would be foolish not to take help where you can get it. So partnering with ORECA made a lot of sense."

Although ready to green-light the programme, there was still a wait for the entry to be confirmed. At that point, the chassis and Nissan engines could be purchased and team (operated by Manor Endurance Racing, a subsidiary of Booth and Lowdon's Manor parent company) was up and running.

There was also the small matter of the driver line-up to sort out. While at first this was intended as a one-car operation, Manor added a second car given the level of interest and the majority of the driver roster is of team alumni. Will Stevens (pictured), James Jakes and Tor Graves occupy the #44, with Roberto Merhi, Matt Rao and Richard Bradley in the #45. Of those only the latter two are Manor virgins.

"We didn't announce what we were doing before our entry was announced and very few people were really aware of what the plan was," says Lowdon of driver recruitment. "But as soon as they did, we had contact from an awful lot of people.

"LMP2 has become very attractive to drivers who are looking to develop a professional career in motor-racing so there's a large number interested. Initially we entered one car, but the level of interest was very high.

"We knew a lot of the drivers involved, not just those now in our team, but in WEC because there are so many former Manor drivers in the championship. That's an advantage for us because there's a lot that is new to us."

Not only has Manor, which was formed in 1990 to compete in Formula Renault in the UK, never raced a car with a roof, but it also has no experience of multi-driver cars. So as well as learning a new car, a new type of racing and doing so with a team that was being hastily assembled, it had to do so while adapting to a more collaborative way of working.

In that regard, the driver line-up is decently balanced and has several drivers who will have been able to bring budget. Bradley was in the leading ORECA in last year's championship with the mothballed KCMG LMP2 team, so brings experience and a good understanding of the way to get the best out of the car.

Graves, in the other car, is the experienced hand (and has started more races for the Manor team than any other, having driven for it in Formula Renault and F3) although hasn't had the success Bradley has.

The other four are sportscar rookies, two of which raced for Manor in F1 last year.

So with the drivers and budget in place, it was just a question of getting the cars going. This wasn't the work of a moment. Its first chassis, ORECA 05 chassis 11, was completed by the team in the Paul Ricard paddock ahead of the so-called prologue pre-season test in late March.

The car ran well straight out of the box, completing 565 miles on day one. The Manor LMP2 team was in action.

"We finished the car hours before the prologue started," says Lowdon. "That's testament to the product that we could fire it up and do so much on the first day. One of the other advantages of ORECA is that it's based at Paul Ricard, so that made that possible."

The second car didn't run until last week, when it was shaken down at Rockingham. Chassis 10 (an earlier chassis originally destined for the KCMG team that subsequently became available) was built up in time for a day of testing in wet conditions. So at least both cars head to Silverstone having completed some real, if limited, mileage.

Saying that, the journey to the circuit isn't exactly an arduous one. While Manor Motorsport has traditionally been based at Dinnington in South Yorkshire, which housed the racing operation of the original iteration of the Manor F1 team that made its debut as Virgin in 2010, the decision was made not to operate the team out of there. Instead, Manor recently moved into an industrial unit at the home of the British GP.

There are sound reasons for this, based on the need to assemble a strong team of experience, capable and available personnel.

"Dinnington is in slightly the wrong place," says Lowdon. "A lot of the people in the team are ones we've worked with in the past in the F1 team, or in other formulas. Because of that, a lot of them are based further south. So it made sense to set up yet another workshop... I don't know how many we've had of those over the years!

"The team is pretty much there in terms of personnel. We've got John as team principal and he's focused on the racing side. I'm doing the commercial side, but on race day I'm still doing the sporting director role - although they call it team manager in sportscars.

"The engineering team is largely people who have been in WEC for a number of years and we've got some good, experienced people leading the team. Somebody who is pivotal to the project is Kieron Marchant, who was chief mechanic at the F1 team up until the end of last year. His role in the endurance team is way beyond that of a chief mechanic.

"In total, we'll be at Silverstone with 25-30 people in the team, which is quite normal for LMP2. We had no shortage of people who are keen to work with us and come back. That's been the nice part of putting the whole team together."

So what should we expect from Manor? We know the ORECA-Nissan 05 is a car capable of winning and fighting from the championship, so a team running it well with strong drivers would be in the mix for class wins. Arguably, the second car with Merhi, Bradley and silver-rated ex-British F3 racer Rao is the stronger of the two in terms of Manor entries.

Lowdon is quick to stress that Silverstone is a learning experience, but obviously the ambitions are to emerge as a frontrunning team sooner rather than later.

"The first objective is to gain the respect of the opposition, because this is a very new championship for us," he says.

"Every team in the paddock is trying to build the best sportscar team in the world and we're no different. But it's difficult to make predictions."

Longer-term, Lowdon is not ruling anything out for Manor. He's even open to the possibility of getting involved in F1 again.

But in the sportscar realm, this is a team with real ambitions. Currently, it's running a customer car in the secondary prototype class, but Lowdon is keen to go beyond that.

"There are interesting times ahead, depending on how the LMP1 Light or privateer LMP1 regulations pan out," he says.

"And there could be an opportunity there with a manufacturer in future. In F1, we gained some very good experience about what's required to set up a sensible manufacturing or design base, so everything is possible.

"That knowledge stands us in good stead for the future. It could be five or 10 years before we do anything, because it's going to depend a lot on what changes in that time.

"But we're well placed to look at the best opportunities and decide what is the best way to take the business in.

"In the short term, the focus is on racing the LMP2 cars."

That is a big enough challenge in itself for a team that has only three proper days of running across its two cars.

But Booth and Lowdon have proved themselves equal to most challenge over the years, so you can be sure Manor will at the very least establish itself as a credible sportscar team over the coming season.