British American Racing have every reason to be pleased with the apparent improvement in the Williams 2002 car - because they now have one of the men responsible for this. After 12 years of relative obscurity in the Grove-based outfit, aerodynamicist Geoff Willis begins a new challenge in the limelight of BAR. Will Gray talked to an optimistic Willis about his move and the future that awaits BAR

The performance of the Williams-BMW cars this season will surely be putting smiles on the faces of British American Racing - because they now have control of one of their rivals' prized assets.

Despite BAR's current struggles to rise up from the midfield ranks, they now know they are on the beginning of a new era - an era that looks brighter than ever, because it comes at the expense of their Grove-based Championship challengers with the arrival of new technical director, Geoffrey Willis.

At Williams, Willis, a grey-haired designer, worked a faceless existence under technical director Patrick Head. One half of a key partnership, he worked on the aerodynamics of the Williams-BMW machines alongside the younger long-haired Gavin Fisher, who took control of the mechanical side.

After 12 years at Williams, Willis has thrown away that challenge just as he was on the brink of perhaps the ultimate success and thrust himself into the limelight with a high-profile job at BAR. And now he believes he can merge the philosophies he learned at Williams with the ones developed by his new team to create a positive future.

"I am very glad with what I have found," said Willis of his first impressions of BAR. "I have come here and found a group of people who have a very positive attitude. We have done some reorganization and I am very confident.

"It is quite different but it has some parallels to Williams. It has got a relatively stable group of people working together and it is almost devoid of politics, people are very open, information is shared very well and people have good working relationships.

"It is obviously different in the sense that it does not have the same sort of history and in terms of resources it has obviously not got the level that Williams has, but I certainly wouldn't say it has a bad level of resources. It has got quite a good factory and with some nice bits in it and they do some things, in truth, better than Williams do.

"It has been quite healthy to come there and think 'That is a good way of doing it' and in terms of planning and coordination management, whether it is manufacturing bits of the wind tunnel or build specs for race cars and on-track processes, they are quite a procedural company. That seems to work quite well and everybody seems to use the structures as they were intended."

Willis, 42, has a strong reason to believe he can be successful. Born in Southampton and educated in Cambridge, he has a background in America's Cup yachting, the area to which his Williams predecessor Adrian Newey is predicted to be heading once he finishes his stint with the McLaren-Mercedes Formula One team.

A doctor of Hydrodynamics, Willis adds Aerodynamics and Computation Fluid Dynamics to his strong CV to prove he is capable of knowing his way around the aero side of the car and Newey, 362 days his elder, has already proven it is possible to successfully oversee a team's engineering squad with such a background.

Willis, like Newey in the point of his career last year that saw him almost joining the Jaguar team, needed a new challenge. His Williams days were done, and although he seems like a quiet 'behind the scenes' man, he had been complaining of a life of obscurity, and genuinely wanted to be noticed.

Well, nowhere in Formula One (save, perhaps, at the aforementioned Jaguar) are there bigger spotlights beaming down than those on the struggling Brackley-based squad. So step on stage Mr Willis: Your time has come.

"There is a need to be driven by new challenges," said Willis of his move. "We should always take up new challenges, they may look scary but if you take them you tend to regret what you didn't do rather than what you did do.

"I don't underestimate how much work we have to do but I am very confident that we are beginning to get ourselves in the right direction to solve some of those problems."

One of the difficulties that Willis believes is inherent at his new BAR team is that the design room is not full of changes, and although the team bonding is strong, he fears things may have become a bit stagnant.

"The downside of it having been pretty stable is that it has probably been a little too inward-looking for the last couple of years," admitted Willis. "It started off with an influx from Formula One but it has not appreciated where the Formula One design level is over the last few years. It has generally drifted away.

"For me, one of the biggest worries about coming to BAR from Williams was 'am I going to have strength in the depth that is needed' because it is not a one man business any more and you require a lot of good people.

"We have re-organised, and as a result of that we have got three or four gaps. We are going to fill those fairly shortly, not with big names because we are not a big name company, but when we have filled them I think actually, in technical prowess, we will be pretty close to Williams. I think in some areas we will be able to take them head-on.

"That said we are still going to be short of absolute racing experience. I don't know how many man-years experience Williams have, thousands probably, and Williams know what it is like to win races and Championships. That is a very important quality."

That technical prowess is clearly key to Willis's future, as there will be no hiding with new BAR boss David Richards now at the helm. In the past, as former boss Craig Pollock previously revealed to Atlas F1, hiring and firing was not easy. Richards has already proven with massive job cuts that, in his reign, those times have changed.

But that is not a worry for Willis. He is certainly, unlike his new team, on the pace - and he knows he has the ideas to take BAR to the top because he had thought of the 'radical' new layout Ferrari have developed in this year's F2002 when he was working at Williams last year.

"It is not radical," he mused. "I thought about that sort of layout when I was looking at this year's Williams. It has a very narrow and very low top deck, but that had a number of packaging difficulties and some pretty marginal performance gains.

"Maybe Ferrari felt they could risk introducing their new car late so could be a bit more radical with it. There is certainly potential to take that concept further and their car certainly is nicely integrated.

"But a lot of Formula One design is a packaging exercise and every year you have to say 'am I doing this just because it worked last time or if I look at it how else can I do it?' - it is basically a straight forward thing.

"Next year's British American Racing car will be a completely new car and I don't expect any carry over whatsoever. But it is not going to be radical, because where we are at the moment it is not appropriate to be radical.

"It will not be conservative because that sounds backward - it will be mainstream. It will take a couple of years to get to the level I want, but we can do 75 percent of that in the first year."

One thing Willis is particularly keen to work on is the team's partnership with engine suppliers Honda. Despite the difficulties that the Japanese company faces in supplying both BAR and their rivals Jordan, Willis believes he can forge a closer relationship with them in the future.

Honda already have engineers on site at BAR's Brackley factory and although Willis says it is up to Honda whether that project increases, what he wants to do is tap into the massive pool of knowledge that they can provide.

"I think we can be more open," he said of the relationship with the Japanese giants. "I think with Honda we have an opportunity that some of the top teams who we hope to compete with in two or three years do not in that we have the ability to be more integrated.

"A company like Honda have probably got nine or ten thousand engineers in engine and chassis and suspension research and development and that is an enormous resource.

"If we can tap that at a very integrated level, then it gives the chance for a medium resource team like us to compete at the top level. What we want to do is improve the two-way flow of information and use Honda for what they are good at."

Honda may not have got things quite right yet, but with a racing pedigree such as theirs, the former World Champions are not going to let their Formula One adventure stop until they succeed. Read the same for one Geoffrey Willis. British American Racing could be about to hit the big time.