Sam Michael is going home

[Londoner]

The chap is leaving McLaren at the end of the season

How long until McLaren end up having a jump in competitiveness?

[Cynon]

The chap is leaving McLaren at the end of the season

How long until McLaren end up having a jump in competitiveness?

Once/If Honda get their act together.

[DanielPT]

Sam Michael's CV:

1993 - Hired by Lotus.
1994 - Lotus went Bankrupt.
1994 - Hired by Jordan to work on the factory and promoted race engineer later on.
2001 - Hired by Williams (3rd WCC)
2004 - Promoted to Technical Director (4th WCC).
2011 - Resigned from position at Williams (9th WCC).
2012 - Hired by McLaren as a Sporting Director (3rd WCC).
2014 - Leaves McLaren at the end of the year (currently 5th WCC).

Well, it must be said that the only stain in his CV is that Jordan stint.

[CoopsII]

I thought he was pants at Williams, in interviews he always appeared to have just woken up, didn't seem to know what was going on. Loser.

[Eifelland]

I thought he was pants at Williams, in interviews he always appeared to have just woken up, didn't seem to know what was going on. Loser.

I always thought he was alright. Obviously he wasn't Ross Brawn, but I always had him about the same level as Rob Smedley, and everyone loves him.

[Rob Dylan]

Not gonna lie, my only experience is from him taking over at Williams, then Williams being in the doldrums for years. Then he moves to McLaren, and McLaren have their worst years in ages. I've never exactly thought he was all that good, and at least his record to me shows that he is associated with these failures.

[mario]

Not gonna lie, my only experience is from him taking over at Williams, then Williams being in the doldrums for years. Then he moves to McLaren, and McLaren have their worst years in ages. I've never exactly thought he was all that good, and at least his record to me shows that he is associated with these failures.

It has to be said that he did also come to the fore at Williams at a time when things started to go rapidly wrong for the team in areas outside of his control.

In 2004, Terzi's ambitious 'walrus nose' design proved to be a bad decision, although the team did partially recover the situation towards the end of the year. 2005, meanwhile, was poor mainly because Williams had badly alienated BMW by that point, leading BMW to cut off much of their investment into Williams and to slow development of their V10 engines down as they diverted resources towards building Sauber up instead.

If you move forward from that, their problems in 2006 mainly came from external suppliers, and in particular Xtrac's hydraulics systems, which were chronically unreliable and cost the team dearly in terms of DNF's. To make matters worse, their finances in 2006 were utterly shot by the withdrawal of BMW - their spending was as high as it had been when BMW was bankrolling them, but their funding was nowhere near high enough to sustain that level of investment, and the cutbacks they had to make after that hindered the team for years.

The 2007 season, by contrast, wasn't that bad, but they were hit by the fact that Toyota were sticking to the terms of the engine freeze much more strictly than Ferrari, Renault or Mercedes were, and that lack of development meant that Toyota were widely considered to have the weakest engine in the field by 2009, coinciding with Williams's drift backwards at that time.

Having Nakajima imposed on them by Toyota didn't exactly help either - Rosberg certainly showed that the cars could be fairly consistent points scorers if driven by a more competitive driver and racked up a steady stream of top six finishes in 2009. 2010 and 2011 were somewhat middling years, but again there were some flaws with the engine - the switch to Cosworth was intended to give Williams an opportunity to guide engine development to their parameters, but the problem was that the Cosworth V8 engine suffered from a much more severe drop in performance with increasing mileage than their rivals, an issue they never really fully got on top of, as well as reportedly being thirstier to boot.

Even after he left, it wasn't as if Williams transformed themselves overnight into a more competitive team - it also remains to be seen whether Williams really can sustain this level of competitiveness or will fall backwards as time rolls on.

As for McLaren, well, their performance in 2011 was somewhat lucky as they were in major trouble before the start of the season - their success mainly came from copying parts from Red Bull's car (even McLaren grudgingly admitted that in 2011) rather than their own in house abilities. As for 2012, their problems mainly came from their technical department, which Sam Michael had no involvement with - in fact, if we are honest, McLaren's problems in recent years have stemmed from their technical department looking for a 'silver bullet' to topple Red Bull, which is more the fault of the Technical Director rather than the Sporting Director.

[mrfakeboullier]

Not gonna lie, my only experience is from him taking over at Williams, then Williams being in the doldrums for years. Then he moves to McLaren, and McLaren have their worst years in ages. I've never exactly thought he was all that good, and at least his record to me shows that he is associated with these failures.

It has to be said that he did also come to the fore at Williams at a time when things started to go rapidly wrong for the team in areas outside of his control.

In 2004, Terzi's ambitious 'walrus nose' design proved to be a bad decision, although the team did partially recover the situation towards the end of the year. 2005, meanwhile, was poor mainly because Williams had badly alienated BMW by that point, leading BMW to cut off much of their investment into Williams and to slow development of their V10 engines down as they diverted resources towards building Sauber up instead.

If you move forward from that, their problems in 2006 mainly came from external suppliers, and in particular Xtrac's hydraulics systems, which were chronically unreliable and cost the team dearly in terms of DNF's. To make matters worse, their finances in 2006 were utterly shot by the withdrawal of BMW - their spending was as high as it had been when BMW was bankrolling them, but their funding was nowhere near high enough to sustain that level of investment, and the cutbacks they had to make after that hindered the team for years.

The 2007 season, by contrast, wasn't that bad, but they were hit by the fact that Toyota were sticking to the terms of the engine freeze much more strictly than Ferrari, Renault or Mercedes were, and that lack of development meant that Toyota were widely considered to have the weakest engine in the field by 2009, coinciding with Williams's drift backwards at that time.

Having Nakajima imposed on them by Toyota didn't exactly help either - Rosberg certainly showed that the cars could be fairly consistent points scorers if driven by a more competitive driver and racked up a steady stream of top six finishes in 2009. 2010 and 2011 were somewhat middling years, but again there were some flaws with the engine - the switch to Cosworth was intended to give Williams an opportunity to guide engine development to their parameters, but the problem was that the Cosworth V8 engine suffered from a much more severe drop in performance with increasing mileage than their rivals, an issue they never really fully got on top of, as well as reportedly being thirstier to boot.

Even after he left, it wasn't as if Williams transformed themselves overnight into a more competitive team - it also remains to be seen whether Williams really can sustain this level of competitiveness or will fall backwards as time rolls on.

As for McLaren, well, their performance in 2011 was somewhat lucky as they were in major trouble before the start of the season - their success mainly came from copying parts from Red Bull's car (even McLaren grudgingly admitted that in 2011) rather than their own in house abilities. As for 2012, their problems mainly came from their technical department, which Sam Michael had no involvement with - in fact, if we are honest, McLaren's problems in recent years have stemmed from their technical department looking for a 'silver bullet' to topple Red Bull, which is more the fault of the Technical Director rather than the Sporting Director.

In my opinion it's no co-incidence that Ferrari and McLaren have never quite managed to hit the proverbial nail on the head in terms of car performance in the 2009-13 formula, as they never got a head start on 2009 performance which then, in my opinion, has had the knock on effect until now. I also think McLaren have the loss of Hamilton to thank as well, same as when Senna left

[DemocalypseNow]

McLaren explains reasons for Michael resignation

[Minardi Man]

Seemed like a nice guy, but overrated by the teams, like some footballers i can think of (*coughballotelicough*)

[mario]

Not gonna lie, my only experience is from him taking over at Williams, then Williams being in the doldrums for years. Then he moves to McLaren, and McLaren have their worst years in ages. I've never exactly thought he was all that good, and at least his record to me shows that he is associated with these failures.

It has to be said that he did also come to the fore at Williams at a time when things started to go rapidly wrong for the team in areas outside of his control.

In 2004, Terzi's ambitious 'walrus nose' design proved to be a bad decision, although the team did partially recover the situation towards the end of the year. 2005, meanwhile, was poor mainly because Williams had badly alienated BMW by that point, leading BMW to cut off much of their investment into Williams and to slow development of their V10 engines down as they diverted resources towards building Sauber up instead.

If you move forward from that, their problems in 2006 mainly came from external suppliers, and in particular Xtrac's hydraulics systems, which were chronically unreliable and cost the team dearly in terms of DNF's. To make matters worse, their finances in 2006 were utterly shot by the withdrawal of BMW - their spending was as high as it had been when BMW was bankrolling them, but their funding was nowhere near high enough to sustain that level of investment, and the cutbacks they had to make after that hindered the team for years.

The 2007 season, by contrast, wasn't that bad, but they were hit by the fact that Toyota were sticking to the terms of the engine freeze much more strictly than Ferrari, Renault or Mercedes were, and that lack of development meant that Toyota were widely considered to have the weakest engine in the field by 2009, coinciding with Williams's drift backwards at that time.

Having Nakajima imposed on them by Toyota didn't exactly help either - Rosberg certainly showed that the cars could be fairly consistent points scorers if driven by a more competitive driver and racked up a steady stream of top six finishes in 2009. 2010 and 2011 were somewhat middling years, but again there were some flaws with the engine - the switch to Cosworth was intended to give Williams an opportunity to guide engine development to their parameters, but the problem was that the Cosworth V8 engine suffered from a much more severe drop in performance with increasing mileage than their rivals, an issue they never really fully got on top of, as well as reportedly being thirstier to boot.

Even after he left, it wasn't as if Williams transformed themselves overnight into a more competitive team - it also remains to be seen whether Williams really can sustain this level of competitiveness or will fall backwards as time rolls on.

As for McLaren, well, their performance in 2011 was somewhat lucky as they were in major trouble before the start of the season - their success mainly came from copying parts from Red Bull's car (even McLaren grudgingly admitted that in 2011) rather than their own in house abilities. As for 2012, their problems mainly came from their technical department, which Sam Michael had no involvement with - in fact, if we are honest, McLaren's problems in recent years have stemmed from their technical department looking for a 'silver bullet' to topple Red Bull, which is more the fault of the Technical Director rather than the Sporting Director.

In my opinion it's no co-incidence that Ferrari and McLaren have never quite managed to hit the proverbial nail on the head in terms of car performance in the 2009-13 formula, as they never got a head start on 2009 performance which then, in my opinion, has had the knock on effect until now. I also think McLaren have the loss of Hamilton to thank as well, same as when Senna left

I agree that, at least in part, both of those teams struggled due to the fact that they never really got off to a good start after the 2009 season - Newey himself has spoken of his cars from that era as being refinements of the previous model rather than separate models in their own right.

Then again, at times McLaren did seem to be getting close to being on a level footing with Red Bull, such as in 2012 - the problem is, by McLaren's own admission, the car was competitive and outperforming their expectations on the track, but they didn't know why it was performing so well on the track, hence why they struggled to subsequently develop the car. At least Ferrari seemed to know where the problems were creeping in from - the issues between correlating their results from the TMG wind tunnel in Cologne, Sauber's facilities and Ferrari's own upgraded wind tunnel - even if they were not always able to actually solve them.

That, I think, probably explains to a certain extent why they ended up losing Hamilton, which I think is a symptom of their issues. Relations between Hamilton and the senior management of the team seem to have foundered on a number of points, and one of them seems to be that Hamilton was losing faith in McLaren's technical abilities due to the unreliability of the car in 2012 and a number of rather basic operational errors. McLaren may be starting to improve on that front thanks to their aggressive hiring policy and Boullier's guidance, but you still wonder if McLaren are operationally sharp enough to hit the ground running and to make the most of their partnership with Honda in 2015.