Williams Reshuffle Not Prompted by Results

New Williams-BMW technical director Sam Michael said on Thursday that his promotion and Patrick Head's re-positioning as director of engineering has not been prompted by the team's recent poor performances.

Williams can claim just two podium finishes this season with Juan Pablo Montoya's second place in Malaysia and third place in San Marino and have dropped behind Renault and BAR-Honda in the chase of Ferrari in Championship standings.

But Michael, who was announced as technical director on Tuesday, said: "None of it has been prompted by the season. The timing of it may have changed but we always planned to do it at the end of 2004 anyway.

"The change has come at a good time. There are various changes that we made straight away in terms of our development programme, which will take four or five races to come on line.

"But there's a lot of things internally that have changed already. We are pushing for a Championship. My job is to try and keep morale up at the track and give feedback to the factory."

Michael insisted Williams can fight back to winning ways despite the impressive dominance from Ferrari and World Champion Michael Schumacher, who has won five of the six races so far this year.

He said the entire team will not be happy until they reach the top step of the podium again and added: "Even when we came second to Michael Schumacher at Malaysia by only two seconds or so we were not happy.

"We are a very driven company and we are not happy unless we are winning. In the short term we want to turn this season around - we haven't given up on 2004. We are not about taking time off, tearing the papers up and throwing the car away.

"This car can be developed into a car which can win races. There's four areas we are looking at short-term. On the fundamentals we believe we can do a much better job than at the moment.

"The potential in the car is there. The car doesn't have any vices, it's not a car which is hard to drive. It just needs to be developed in the fundamental areas."