For WilliamsF1 Technical Director Sam Michael the opening two races of the 2006 Formula One season has seen the WilliamsF1 cars come away with points in Bahrain, but suffer a double failure in the race in Malaysia. Michael was asked as to how he looked at the opening races.

Michael said: "We’re encouraged that we probably exceeded expectations of our performance for the first couple of races but so far we’ve obviously had a sixth and seventh place in Bahrain and a double DNF in Malaysia, so if you look at the results card, it’s nothing that’s going to excite us. But I think there have been very good signs on both fronts.

We obviously had first and fourth fastest lap in Bahrain, we were quite confident of the cars’ race pace from practice in Malaysia and the DNFs that we had obviously put a stop to us showing what we could have done on Sunday, but I’m quite sure that we can do a good job here in Melbourne as well."

As for the failures in Malaysia it was been reported that the WilliamsF1 team and engine supplier Cosworth have been able to come up with relatively quick fixes to the problems that occurred with the two WilliamsF1 cars.

Michael explained: "Obviously the engine problem that we had on Nico’s car, Cosworth already had a fix in place coming for Melbourne, because obviously you couldn’t otherwise respond that quickly. We’ve tested that solution on the dyno so they are happy with that, and the fault that we had on Mark’s car was a hydraulic line that failed which was probably worth about a hundred quid, so it was one of those ones that had done 17,000 kilometres of winter testing, but decided to give up the ghost then, so that was quite an easy thing to fix. We tested a solution to that at Valencia last week.

As for the performance of the new FW28 in the opening races Michael felt that its performance was encouraging when a range of factors are taken into consideration, including new tyres, a new engine, and a new driver.

Michael added: "The thing that’s encouraging for us is that we expected it to be difficult to start off with. We’ve got one new driver who has turned out to be pretty good, we’ve got a new tyre partner and a new engine partner as well so when you have all those changes, you’re bound not to have things optimised to start with and given that the car doesn’t look too bad to start with, we’re quite encouraged that we can develop it hard. One of the things that we’ve always managed to do at Williams is develop very strongly throughout the year and we don’t see this year as any different."

Michael was asked to comment of the arrival of Nico Rosberg in the team and how Mark Webber has dealt with the arrival of a driver who certainly has shown some very good performances in the opening races of the season.

Michael said: "The effect on Mark has been… I think it’s been very positive for both of them. Mark’s a very mature guy, very talented and fast and they are using both their experiences together. They get on very well as team-mates, considering they’ve only known each other for a few months and he’s good, no problem."