We won't give up: Williams chief

Sam Michael has sounded a defiant warning to Williams’ Formula One rivals after taking control of the team, vowing not to throw in the towel this season.

Williams look out of the championship chase, trailing Ferrari by 33 points in the constructors’ battle with lead driver Juan Pablo Montoya 27 points down on Michael Schumacher in the drivers’ race.

But Michael, who this week became the youngest-ever technical director at a top Formula One team after taking over from Patrick Head, has no intention of giving up the fight.

The 33-year-old insists Williams’ 2004 car is capable of winning races given the right development, although he is keen to stress a disappointing start to the season was not why Head stepped aside.

“None of it has been prompted by the season,” he said as preparations got underway at the Nurburgring for the European Grand Prix, with practice beginning this morning.

“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’s 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 feed back to the factory.

“We are not here for anything but winning. 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.”

Michael, who was chief engineer prior to his promotion, has already pinpointed areas he expects to improve, although Sunday’s race at the Nurburgring is likely to come too soon for his influence to be felt.

He added: “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. We know what to do to make those right but it just takes time.

“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.

“There’s one area on the car where we didn’t do a good enough job, the other area we had targets and achieved them but they weren’t high enough.”

Michael admitted his rise to technical director – a role which puts him in charge of Williams’ entire effort to build and improve their car – had always been an ambition.

“It’s been a long-term plan of mine and it’s been a lot of hard work – but that hard work hasn’t really started yet,” he said.