Williams Confirm Technical Team Reshuffle

The Williams Formula One team confirmed today that Sam Michael will become the new technical director, taking over from Patrick Head.

As reported yesterday by Atlas F1, 33-year old Michael will take Head's position as the Briton moves into a new role within the Grove-based squad.

"Naturally, I am extremely pleased to have been given such a positive vote of confidence with the appointment to the position of Technical Director," said Michael, who had worked as chief operations engineer up until now.

"I share Patrick's view that this division of responsibilities will free Patrick to take on an important strategic role, and the timing allows me to take charge of the progression of the FW27 from the outset.

"I think it is obvious given the growth in complexity of the technical processes, our organisation and the level of competition in Formula One that we organise ourselves in a smarter fashion."

Head, meanwhile will take up the new post of director of engineering, and he will continue to be fully involved. Williams said the company director and shareholder will shift his emphasis away from daily technical operational duties to focus on "long view technology strategy."

"For clarity, I am retaining my day to day executive involvement and equity holding in WilliamsF1," said Head. "This is not a prelude to retirement. When Adrian Newey joined us in 1990, I moved from Chief Designer to Technical Director, and now I think the time and opportunity is right to make a further change.

"I will be supporting Sam fully in his new role and I expect to be no less busy with the new challenges I have set myself."

The team also confirmed the completion of their new wind tunnel, which is now fully operational. The new facility supplements the team's existing first tunnel.

The new tunnel technology incorporates a full size continuous steel belt test facility running at 80m/s, with full synchronous multi-axis model management providing yaw, pitch, heave, roll, steer and cross wind simulation.

"Self-evidently, now we have two tunnels, our lead times for aero developments will improve significantly," said Williams' chief aerodynamicist Antonia Terzi. "But more importantly, with small increments of aero improvements to be found, it is increasingly important that tunnel results are highly accurate.

"As we are able to replicate the multi-dimensional factors a race car experiences on the track, we are already seeing accuracy improvements of 30%, and this degree of accuracy will make it easier to precisely confirm and quickly incorporate aero developments into the race car's continuous evolution."