IN THE marble reception area of the Williams factory, where an obsolete grand prix car crouches amidst a vast silence, Patrick Head's voice can be heard booming along the corridors from a distant office. He is on the phone to a colleague, discussing the aerodynamics of his new car, saying something about "low-pressure areas".

Most racing-car designers hold such conversations only in whispers, and then not until they've had their offices swept for bugs. Head doesn't give secrets away either, but if you want a straight answer in Formula One, the technical director of Williams Grand Prix Engineering may be your best chance.

Short and square-rigged, the 50-year-old Head is as blunt as they come in the conspiratorial world of grand prix racing. It was his remark about drivers with fragile egos", for example, that exposed the rift between Damon Hill and the team's principals two years ago. His bluntness, it should be noted, has its own strategic uses.

This has not been the easiest pre-season period for Head and his partner and managing director, Frank Williams. The opening of the Ayrton Senna hearings in Imola, the acrimonious departure of their chief designer, Adrian Newey, and the continuing argument over the terms of their return (along with McLaren and Tyrrell) to the fold of the Formula Ones Constructors' Association all combined to form a distracting prelude to the new campaign. None of these matters is yet resolved, but they travelled to Australia this week as clear favourites to maintain the dominance their cars - although not always their drivers - have enjoyed throughout the decade.

At Melbourne last year, the two Williams-Renaults occupied the front row of the grid and scored a one-two finish. Their rookie, Jacques Villeneuve, gave Hill, their established star, a major fright before an oil leak forced him to yield the lead in the closing stages. This year Villeneuve is the established star, with Heinz-Harald Frentzen cast as the rookie. The rest of the paddock is waiting to see whether the German rewards Frank Williams' faith, or whether the spurned Hill will have the last laugh.

Head's early impression of the new recruit, based on recent tests at various European circuits, is that "he's very talented and very quick, and most of the time he seems to stay on the track pretty well".

Most of the time? That sounded rather a pale recommendation. Then Head mentioned an incident in testing at Magny-Cours a few days earlier, when Frentzen had been sent out in a brand-new car. "He slid off the track after three laps into the gravel and was towed back. He went out again and about eight laps later he proceeded to smash the bottom of the thing in. We had to repair the chassis and invite him to go home and have a think."

He gave a slightly grim laugh. "From what I've observed so far, my impression is that Jacques capability, his skill level and judgement, is at a higher level at the moment, and if that rattles Heinz-Harald then he could have a lot of problems. If he handles that reasonably well, if he plays himself in maturely and keeps his head down, I would have thought that by halfway through the season he'll be up with Jacques. But my impression is that if he tries to be there right at the beginning he'll have a lot of accidents."

No one has accused Villeneuve of lacking confidence. "He's fairly cocky, but if you're 25-years-old and earning a few million dollars a year, you're going to be cocky. You can't knock him down for that."

And does that confidence give him the capacity to lift the team at the right moment? "I think so, basically because he's very comfortable as a racing driver. It isn't something that makes him bite his nails. He loves being a racing driver, so he goes around with a grin all over his face. Provided his car's running reasonably well, he's very positive about it. So he's easy for the team to respond to.

The team had been helped to last year's double championship success, he said, by disappointments elsewhere. "It surprised me that the McLaren was as poor as it was, for instance, although their engine was pretty good. And I'm sure it surprised Benetton that they could go from winning the constructors' championship one season to not winning a race in the next."

As for Ferrari, Head was mildly scathing about the failure of the team to make decent use of its vast resources. "What strikes me as odd is that, for all their money, which is about twice our operating budget if you take everything into account, somehow they looked really flaky on the outside, as if they were struggling along like a make-weight team. They didn't seem to have enough bits. They had phenomenal gearbox problems early in the season. If Ferrari are spending 530 million a year employing Schumacher, there really is no excuse for putting inadequate equipment underneath him.

This year's Ferrari does not figure high in Head's predictions for the season. "You never know until you go to the first race," he said, but I think the pecking order may go Williams, McLaren, Benetton, Jordan, Ferrari.

"I think we'll be very fast, but I'm not yet confident of our reliability. McLaren are happy with their test programme, and I think they'll be quite reliable. I think we'll be quicker than them, but they may be pretty quick, and quicker than Benetton and Ferrari. I suspect Jordan will be in there somewhere. Their new car is very good. They've got young, inexperienced drivers who may make some silly mistakes in the races, but in pure car speed Giancarlo Fisichella and Ralf Schumacher are very quick."

And had the team missed Hill, absent from their winter test programme for the first time since 1991? "Yes," Head said. "I wouldn't say we miss him necessarily as a development driver. Jacques has done an extremely good job at the same thing. But Damon's character in the team was very good. He got on with people and he worked well within the team. So, in that way, yes.

But Head is no hypocrite. ice and Williams had their reasons for denying Hill the chance to defend his title, and now their judgment is on the line. In this least sentimental of sports, a win on Sunday is all that counts.