Patrick Head: Steadying the Ship

It's been hard to judge winter testing form, and in truth only two things seem clear thus far. One is that Ferrari and McLaren are again the teams to beat, and the other is that Honda appear to have made little progress and are once again struggling.

Who really is leading the chase of the two top teams, however, remains to be seen. Among those who have regularly been near the sharp end at most recent tests are Williams, and the team have been more consistently impressive than several of the works outfits.

Things are most definitely looking up at Grove, although it remains questionable whether or not the team will one day come anywhere close to regaining the form that saw them win seven drivers' world championships between 1980 and 1997, and challenge for another as recently as 2003.

That latter season represented the peak of the partnership between the team and BMW, but a marriage that appeared to be made in heaven soon failed. A divorce was announced in 2005, and in 2006, the team ran as a true privateer and paid for their Cosworth engines.

Williams slipped into the unaccustomed role of a midfield player, and frustrating reliability problems often proved expensive on occasions when points were up for grabs.

In 2007, the team hooked up with a new partner in Toyota. There were signs that a gradual return to competitiveness was underway, as Nico Rosberg became a regular top-eight qualifier and points-scorer. Clearly team co-owner Patrick Head intends that the momentum will continue into the team's 30th anniversary season.

"Obviously 2006 was a very low point, so one can look good relative to 2006!" he says. "The thing that was awful about 2006 was that the car at times was reasonably competitive, but it was very inconsistent track-to-track.

"The performance level wasn't high enough generally, and on top of that, the reliability was absolutely terrible, something we'd generally in the past been pretty good at.

"So we fell off the perch in just about every aspect. And obviously we had to have a good look at why, and I think we understood quite a lot about why for the reliability, and we made quite a lot of changes internally.

"We set up a much more formal structure than we had in the old historical days, where we set up heads of departments and established that they were responsible for delivering reliable components so that the senior people - the chief designer and so on - didn't have to go chasing after every problem. We've certainly done that, so we're much better organised internally.

"So we made progress in 2007 on reliability, although not enough. We had four car-related DNFs, one was a software problem, while others were engine systems, like a little water leak on a quick release coupling.

"It was little things, but it's about getting on top of that. In truth McLaren ought to have won more championships in the previous six or seven years, but they've also been unreliable. They tried very hard, but they didn't get on top of it, and quite clearly they have now managed to crack it. We're going through that process.

"You don't sit down and say we'll design a car to finish fourth or something like that, you sit down to design the best possible car that you can. We've got very good tunnel facilities, we've got a strong CFD group. Maybe not quite as big as BMW or one or two other teams, but it's a strong group with strong computing power supporting them from Lenovo. I don't think that we can say 'Ah well, no way can we be competitive'."

The now-obsolete Cosworth engine wasn't bad, but Williams appreciated the benefits that came with the extra manufacturer commitment that Toyota could offer.

"I think it's worked very well," says Head. "The engine seems good. It's terribly difficult to know whether one's engine is competitive to all the others, because every car has got a slightly different drag level, but it seems to be a very competitive engine.

"They're very open about their problems, they don't operate behind a wall, so we've got a very good working relationship with them."

Head has long been notoriously cagey about sharing proprietary information with engine partners - it was something that BMW struggled to come to terms with - but unusually the Toyota deal extended to co-operation on gearbox design, as Williams gave the Cologne team a valuable lesson in seamless shift technology.

"Because we started quite early on a seamless shift, we went up one or two routes that didn't prove fruitful," Head explains. "We ran the seamless shift in 2006, but of a different type, and then through 2006 we looked to simplify it and go for a different approach. And that hit all the cherries so to speak very quickly, and looked very good.

"Toyota were working on something as well, but we were six months ahead of them on maturity, so they said, 'OK we'll go with yours.' It was not the whole box, just the gear cluster and change mechanism and the control software. It worked quite well, but they're doing something different next year."

Having had to go through the massive logistical changes in switching from BMW to Cosworth to Toyota over the past three seasons, the team can at least consolidate in 2008, and concentrate on performance enhancement with the FW30. But there are other distractions to be considered.

"We are able to put much more of our focus on to the car design, and not too much on the engine installation, with being able to carry that forward. There are a few flies in the ointment with the banning of traction control, the standard ECU, and all that sort of thing that we've got to deal with.

"In a way it's a nuisance to every team, that the FIA decided to go with McLaren. I'm sure McLaren will play with a straight bat, but we've had to completely rewrite our software and completely re-do all our gearbox strategy, all the diff controls, whereas McLaren are just carrying forward the strategy they've got. For us it's almost like having to learn a new language."

Clearly Williams don't have access to the sort of R&D facilities that the manufacturer teams have in the area of electronics and control systems, but Head is confident in the quality of his staff.

"I think we've got a very good electronics department. It's probably not quite as big as other people's, obviously. But we've people that were doing active ride and wrote all the software for the semi-automatic and the seamless shift. So we've got good people."

Through the course of 2008 the same group will also be involved in the development of KERS technology. The FIA's thinking is that such systems allow manufacturers to justify their F1 spending, but that makes little sense to the likes of Williams, Red Bull and Force India. But the challenge clearly appeals to the engineer in Head, if not the shareholder.

"I'm not saying I don't like all of it, but a lot of it is so far-reaching, the idea of having 200KW of KERS on your car, 100KW at the front axle and 100KW at the rear axle.

"Even for some of the manufacturers F1 this is a pretty expensive exercise now. To start forcing you to have a 100KW motor at the front, that means you've got to have a front driveline, and it very much starts changing the structure of the chassis.

"It's not a bad idea for somebody to put forward blue sky thoughts. I think we're generally supportive of KERS, and like most of the teams we're working on our own KERS project, but pushing ahead with recovering thermal energy and these sorts of things?

"I do think that KERS will give the green issue - the global warming issue, the efficiency of vehicles issue - a much higher profile for the public, and I think that will be a good thing. To some extent it'll be sexy to have a car that's efficient, whether it's done by energy recovery or just a very efficient engine.

"But trying to suggest to the manufacturers that they will actually be able to develop more efficient vehicles by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in F1, to then find out how to make their road cars more efficient, is totally unrealistic. That's not the way they work, it's not the way they think. I'm sure they've been pointing that out.

"All this thermal energy recovery from exhaust systems may well be technically possible on paper, but the cost of it is absolutely astronomic. And it really does not fit with all this other stuff about trying to save costs."

Williams have never been known for extravagance, but since losing BMW, the purse strings have been pulled ever tighter. There is an impressive portfolio of names on the car, but when you're competing with subsidised manufacturer teams, you always need more.

"We're well aware that some of the teams we're competing against, like Red Bull, have got something like four times our budget. But I don't think we want to use that as an excuse really.

"We operate on a very, very tight budget. As always with these things, being on a tight budget can help you, it focuses your attention to try and be very efficient in spending money on the things that are really important and are going to make a difference. But it is a problem, and we've got quite a lot of things that we'd like to be doing if we had a bigger budget.

"We'd like to have a slightly greater lever of breadth on our KERS project so that we can look at two paths in parallel, rather than just one. We'd like to increase the size of our CFD department. I'm told that Red Bull have 120 people in their aero department, well we're about 80, and we used to think we were big!

"It always helps to be bigger, but if the idea was that you solved every problem with money, that's not very efficient. In 2007 nobody said look at little Williams, didn't they do well considering their budget? This is an environment for people who succeed, and we're well aware of that."

Honda provided a one-off boost with the settlement that released Jenson Button from the contract that should have taken him to the team. More recently there were strong suggestions that Williams would sell Rosberg's contract to McLaren, and thus take another handy cheque from a rival.

That didn't happen, but a valuable boost came from another direction. Williams received a 50 percent discount on their engine bill for running Toyota protege Kazuki Nakajima as a test driver last year, and by promoting him to a race seat, the engines are in effect free in 2008.

It's another sign of the changing times that Sir Frank was willing to do something for Toyota that he was not willing to do for Honda 20 years ago, when Kazuki's dad Satoru was being pushed in his direction.

The big difference is that back then Frank knew he has a winning car and taking a Japanese hero did not directly impact the budget, whereas now it clearly does. Given the financial pressures, few can blame the team for taking that route.

Nakajima junior clearly showed potential in GP2, although he was a little erratic, as was also apparent when he had an exploratory outing in the Brazilian GP. Although he ran over his mechanics at his first F1 pitstop, his race pace was enough to convince Head and Williams that they could justify his selection.

"As a driver I think Kazuki is excellent. I'm sure he will have a good career ahead of him, but it's about being able to deliver under pressure, and generally that's where Nico is extremely good."

His presence allowed Williams to ignore the overtures from McLaren and hang on to Rosberg. Indeed, the German's deal was recently extended for an extra year into 2009, and as such, he is arguably one of the team's biggest assets.

"He's been very good. There were one or two races in 2006 where he wasn't that strong, I suppose principally his home race in Hockenheim when he stuffed it 15 minutes into first practice, and then stuffed in on the first lap of the race! I don't know whether that was the amount of media attention or whatever.

"Whereas in 2007 he was very consistent, very good, always been able to get his car into a reasonable operating window for the race with his engineers. I think he's made very good progress.

"He's very quick and he knows how to wring out ... If the car is reasonable, every time you put a new set of tyres on it, you get a time. It hasn't been once in every five laps or something, he's definitely on top of it."

Rosberg clearly raised his game in 2007, as evidenced by McLaren's interest. But he was also flattered to some degree by the poor pace of teammate Alex Wurz. The Austrian bagged a big chunk of the team's points by taking third in Montreal and fourth at the Nurburgring, both races where experience told, and he brought the car safely home. But he simply wasn't fast enough.

"It's difficult to understand why. It wasn't that he really froze in qualifying. If you actually look at most of the races, the biggest thing that happened was that the midfield became much stronger than it was.

"If you're 0.3 seconds behind your teammate and he's on the edge of getting into Q3, then you're going to be on the edge of getting into Q2. I think that's what it was. Nearly every race Alex was 0.3 -0.4 seconds off Nico, and that went for nearly every practice session as well.

"Because of the strength of the midfield, it made him look very poor in terms of the position. Nico could be eighth and Alex 18th."

Having turned 61 last June, Head himself shows few signs of slowing down. Of course, in recent years his role has changed, and it's been a long time since he could claim to have much direct input into a new car, but he retains an overview of technical matters. His ideas are always welcomed.

"The executive leadership of the technical side is by Sam Michael, but I provide input, to Sam mostly, but also directly to [chief designer] Ed Wood, but always with Sam's knowledge, of areas where I think we should be able to make a bigger step than we are.

"If I have some ideas that I think might be useful, and if I can contribute anywhere to organisation matters, then that's good. Even things like having a look at why we were unreliable last year, and having input into how we might solve those problems. I've got 30-something years of experience; it's never going to be worth nothing.

"I've got a good relationship with Sam. I don't think there's any conflict between us. My interest is in doing whatever I can to help return Williams into a competitive position, and in most cases, that isn't something that happens overnight. It's a process, and that's what we're trying to do."

He admits that in recent years he has taken his eye off the ball, and says that won't happen again.

"When Sam became technical director I probably let go a bit more than I should have done. That doesn't mean to say that I didn't turn up for work or whatever, but I probably didn't keep myself close enough. It was probably partly me being oversensitive to the idea of wanting Sam to have a clear field, and not have the old dog sitting on his shoulder all the time.

"And it was partly that I'd ordered a sailing boat and I went off and did my transatlantic sailing at the end of 2005. I'm not saying that for one moment that the whole of our 2006 problem was because my focus was a bit more on my Atlantic trip in the latter half of 2005, but it certainly played a part, and it would be silly of me to say that it didn't.

"You can't have somebody who's central to the technical side who's suddenly just completely unplugged.

"I do stay much closer to what's going on, but it's still very much Sam's game. Where I can help him, it's totally in my interest as a shareholder of Williams.

"And I don't like having to feel pleased that we finished sixth in 2007, it's not the way that I want to be thinking, and certainly not the way that we want anybody in Williams to be thinking."

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