As Chief Operations Officer at Williams F1, it is my responsibility to manage a multi-disciplinary engineering operation at our headquarters just outside Oxford in the UK. In practical terms, this covers a range of responsibilities from maintenance and development of our technical infrastructure – everything from two state of the art wind tunnels to a 24 hour, 7 day a week advanced metallic and composite manufacturing facilities - to project planning the research, development and production of all the components that are required to build our race and test cars.

While this remit may sound analogous to the management of many other engineering operations, what really characterises our business is the fact that we are essentially designing and building one-off prototypes. This means that our designs change all the time, sometimes on a daily basis. So it is less of a sausage machine churning out ‘more of the same’ and rather more of a handcrafted operation where the chef constantly changes the ingredients.

This small detail makes our business incredibly challenging and makes huge demands of our resources and their intelligent deployment. There are typically 334 hours between the end of one race and the start of the next, and how well we use this window to advance our car relative to the opposition shows very clearly on the track every other Sunday.

It may sound like all of this is my problem! Thankfully this is not so. I am one of seven Senior Management Group (SMG) members at Williams and I work particularly closely with Sam Michael, the team Technical Director, as well as Patrick Head, one of the owners of the business and our Director of Engineering. Patrick and Sam guide the drawing office and the engineering design process, as well as lead the track engineering. As COO, I am charged to deliver the designs that they require.

It is the SMG’s expressed objective for the 2008 season to secure the fourth place in the Championship we achieved last season. Not much of an ambition, perhaps? Well, on closer analysis, it is quite a tough goal as McLaren were knocked out of last year’s running, so we automatically have to perform better to remain fourth, and in addition, the mid-grid is now fiercely competitive with ourselves, Renault, Toyota, Honda and Red Bull all within a very tight performance band.

Winter is always the most intensive time for us. There are varying philosophies about the genesis of a new race car, from keeping it in gestation for as long as possible in order to optimise every element of its design, to releasing a car early and getting it to the track for a longer period of pre-season testing. In reality, somewhere in the middle of these two extremes generally serves us best. In 2008, much as any other year, it was pretty difficult to read too much into relative performance during the off-season testing. We all waited with baited breath for the first race, and in Australia this year, we finished on the podium, which was a great way to start.

Australia is however a very idiosyncratic race and in the six years I have been at Williams, I have learnt to temper my early season optimism or pessimism until we get a clearer sense of the form guide after a handful of races.

Our performance in Malaysia validated this healthy scepticism as we went from hero to zero in the space of a week. Every race demands a bespoke race car, and in the second race of the season, we simply didn’t get it right, but it does show how a car that can deliver a top three finish at one race must be completely different to achieve similar performance at the next Grand Prix venue. Nothing can underline the challenges we face in our 334 hours more objectively than this oscillating performance in the first two races of the year!

Thankfully we have bounced back from the disappointment in Kula Lumpur with points finishes in Bahrain, Spain and Turkey. However, we are far from a level of performance that we would be happy with, but I do have cause for some cautious optimism. In the first instance, we seem to be on the uphill slope from a period of difficult reliability that dogged the team in 2006. We worked hard on this last season and largely managed to sustain a good finishing record so far in 2008, although Nico Rosberg’s retirement from a potential 6th place finish at the Spanish GP was particularly disappointing. Sticking to the positives, Kazuki Nakajima took our 2008 gearbox to its fourth sequential race finish which is a new regulation requirement for this season and in so doing we have been one of the few teams to achieve this ambition and avoid the penalties associated with having to change a gearbox.

We also have a raft of mechanical and aerodynamic changes on their way to the car and several race tracks that have historically suited Williams well. In order to ‘proof’ our engineering releases, we are busy testing at various locations in France and Spain and a key part of this is the ability to get data from the car on the track back to engineers in our HQ just as quickly as possible. We do this by making use of the AT&T extended virtual private network, which gives us seamless communications between the garage and Oxford. As the time allowed for testing is very limited, this ability to move data around quickly, reliably and securely is an essential part of our preparation for the season and also for the Grands Prix themselves.

It remains to be seen whether we can achieve our stated ambition to finish fourth this season, but certainly the next races in Monaco and Montreal will go a long way to seeing if we can realise this ambition.