Sam, thanks for your time. You've been in Formula One about 10 years now and perhaps for many people who don't know exactly what you do, you've recently had a big promotion at Williams, but can you just tell us what your position is at Williams and what you do?
Sam Michael: I'm technical director here, which means that I'm responsible for all the racing cars - from design through to operation and results on the circuit. And that job involves working with the chief aerodynamicist and the chief designer and the race engineers and drivers at the track to make sure we're in a position to produce the best car to get the best results for Williams.

So what's involved in creating a Formula One car? How long does it take, how many people, what length of time?
SM: The whole design process typically takes around nine months. The early part of the design process starts off slowly and there's a lot of work in the last three or four months of it. There's 480 people that work at Williams. Total design of a car takes around 25,000 man hours, and the total cost is around 150 million pounds. So you're looking at $350 million Australia.

One of the things they always say about Formula One is that if you've got to ask the price you can't afford it.
SM: That's right, yes.

If you could buy a Williams F1 car?
SM: We produce around six or seven cars per year, so if you divide the $350m (Aus) by seven you're looking at around $50m (Aus), if you want to look at total cost to the company. If you actually go and produce one isolated car by itself then you're talking about a couple of million dollars.

Just going back a little bit, Sam. Before you got to this position, tell us a little bit about your own life, where you came from, where you were born and went to school?
SM: I was born in Geraldton in Western Australia and moved around through New South Wales and Queensland for a while. I studied at high school and college in Canberra, so I was there for quite a number of years, and then I moved to Sydney to go to university and did a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of New South Wales.

How does someone from Western Australia, from the country of Western Australia, end up in Formula One? How did you get into F1?
SM: I think that I was always into motocross bikes, and then later cars, when I was young. And my father taught me a lot about the mechanics when I first started, and from that I got into the racing side. Once I got involved in racing at an early age, racing is a bit like a bug once you get it, you can't really shake it off - and so from that point, while I was at university I worked on rally cars and in the Australian Drivers' Championship on open-wheelers, and that experience on open-wheelers took me into Formula One once I finished my degree.

You've been with three F1 teams now. Can you give us a brief summary of each of those experiences?
SM: I started in Formula One at Lotus and I started there as a design and data engineer and vehicle dynamist, and I left there and went to Jordan. And I was with Jordan for a long time. And when I started at Jordan I worked on the same sort of things. Then I set up research and development there, and when I finished that I became a race engineer. I was a race engineer there up until the end of 2000, and then at that point I joined Williams to become chief operations engineer, and I've been at Williams ever since.

Williams is a team with a great history. We can see a lot of it here in the museum. Being now responsible to create the next Williams BMW F1 car, is that a lot of pressure on you?
SM: It is now, I suppose, because the final buck stops with me, but ultimately any car that I've ever been involved in in the last 10 years has been a lot of pressure on me anyway. Maybe not directly as an end result if it fails, but I've always seen it as a team effort and taken the pressure accordingly. I've never been in a position where "he made the wrong design decision, or he did … or whatever". It's always a team effort and, right from the beginning, even before I was technical director, if we had a car that wasn't performing I always took it personally as well.

I guess you've made it perhaps even a little harder for yourself. Williams won the final race of this year, and in March next year you start the season at the Australian Grand Prix with some expectation: can Williams win the first race?
SM: Whether we win the first race or not we definitely want to return to the front regularly. That means winning races, that's what our intention is for next year. We will do everything that we can to make sure that we can be in that position to lead and challenge for wins. We've been putting in place recently a very strong base in design and aerodynamics, and that should enable us to push the performance of the car and the engine and the tyres and the drivers, so if we're not in a competitive position, or even if we are, even if you're strong in Formula One it doesn't last for very long, you have to make sure you keep the pressure up because of competition from others.