Michael: Williams are moving forwards.

Williams technical director Sam Michael says that the FW27 is performing a lot better than results suggest, and that circumstances have conspired to disguise its true potential in recent races.

Michael is no fan of the current qualifying system, and says that having both cars out first in Monza was a major handicap. Had Nick Heidfeld returned at Spa, or started the weekend and then handed back to Antonio Pizzonia, the number eight car would be first out in qualifying once again.

"We've obviously had issues like early qualifying in Monza, and the [tyre] thing in Turkey," he told Crash.net. "But you can see a definite turnaround in Budapest. Even though we had a lot of fuel on board we progressed up the field fairly well.

"The big disappointment really is the qualifying system. Not the single lap, but the fact that you've got to out in the order of the last race, so if you have one bad race it screws the next one. In Monza we clearly had a car that was the next quickest car behind Renault and McLaren, and we couldn't use it.

"You can see that from the fastest lap times, and you can see that from the way we came through the field. If you look at the whole three-day test, we were consistently the third quickest team behind McLaren and Renault, and the other teams had dropped away. They just popped up there on Saturday, which was a little bit suspicious.

"For a lot of Friday we were running round with very high fuel loads, and Saturday morning as well. We thought we were looking OK, but to go out and first and second in qualifying, you can't do anything."

Michael says the team now has a much better understanding of the FW27 after the period of confusion that followed the updates introduced for France. At Silverstone the team even ran two different versions of the car.

"There's nothing that we can apply to this year's car, but there's a lot of stuff that we're applying to the FW28," he said. "Any small improvements you see in this car from now until the end of the year won't include much of that understanding, except all the area we're working on around the front wing."

Michael says he doesn't know how the FW27 will perform at Spa, despite its high-speed nature.

"Spa is completely different," he said. "At Monza there are a helluva lot of other things like kerbs and traction as well. Kerbs just absolutely dominate Monza, so you've got to have a car that's good over the kerbs, and you've got to have good aero efficiency as well. Spa is a different game again. The car is obviously getting better, but to know exactly where we'll be there is a bit tricky at the moment."