Sam Michael's role to be redefined in 2007

Director of engineering Patrick Head has revealed that Michael will be released from many of his track-side operations, as well as being supported by a stronger internal structure, following a review of how best to help Williams recover their form.

"An F1 team is a big and complex organisation and you have to have many aspects," said Head. "You cannot have one person leading all the activities that are going on.

"Sam has been doing a lot of rethinking and he is changing his focus so that he comes out of operations.

"He has been a data engineer, a race engineer, a senior operations engineer and then became a technical director.

"I think in truth his focus probably stayed a bit too much on the operations side and not enough around the factory, which is where performance, speed and in truth reliability comes from.

"At the track is where you find the unreliable things, but the things that have caused them to be unreliable are found in the design office, in the manufacturing quality, and quality control - that sort of thing.

"It is not just us telling him what he has got to do. He is working himself to make sure it works better in the future."

Michael has missed this weekend's Brazilian Grand Prix so that he can stay at the team's Grove factory and continue work on next year's FW29.

Head, who says the team have '100 percent' faith in Michael's ability, claimed a recent restructuring of staff at the team would help ease Michael's workload so he can exploit the areas he is best at.

"There was a period when we didn't have a chief designer and Sam, possibly, was trying to drive these departments along too much himself where what he actually needed was really top-level people in these departments.

"Sam could then be totally confident that if he is at a race track or doing something different, that they are getting on themselves."

Despite the change of role, Head said he expected Michael to still attend all the races next year if there was enough back-up for him at the factory.

"If we can get all the parts of the company working well, whereby if Sam is not in the factory but the car is still going forward and things are being driven along properly, then there is no reason why Sam shouldn't be at all the races next year.

"That will be a decision he will make in best how to use his time."