Michael plays down comeback

A recent managment reshuffle was announced last month which sees Michael replace veteran Patrick Head as the team's technical director while Head assumes a new wider role as director of engineering.

Driver Ralf Schumacher said the changes were a positive step for the team and he admitted that he expected to see some improvement during the course of the next three to four races.

Michael though has played down Schumacher's assertion and adopted a more cautious approach, but he is satisfied at least that the team have now identified the car's problems, which a few weeks ago were not clear.

"We know where the problems are, it's just a matter of how fast we can bring those improvements," he said, "We've got a short-term plan for this season and, then, medium to long-term plans for next year. How long it takes us to turn around this year is a bit hard to debate, but we're concentrating on three or four main areas to try and improve the car.

"We're not so far behind that it's not that recoverable. In Malaysia, we finished within 10 seconds of Ferrari, and we've had a couple of bad races since then. We knew that Barcelona and Imola would be hard for us, and we thought that it would be Monaco or Nurburgring where we would start to turn around. But we've got to spend the next two or three races getting through with the current performance and then hopefully we can bring some more steps."

Williams are currently fourth in the constructors' championship on 36 points behind Ferrari (106), Renault (61) and BAR (46).