Williams believes the performance of George Russell at the Hungarian Grand Prix is proof that a new approach is working.
After a year spent some way off the back of the grid, the Briton almost made Q2 in Budapest and kept two midfield cars behind him to finish 16th in the race.
This comes thanks to a number of upgrades introduced in recent races and deputy boss Claire Williams admits it has been a slow process.
"There have been a lot of mechanical upgrades or improvements, etc – work that’s been going on that you may not necessarily have seen – that has really helped stabilise the car and give the drivers greater confidence," she told Formula1.com
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"A lot of work has gone into some of those components, but then obviously we needed to focus on aero performance as well because that’s where we were really down after the winter.
"But through putting in this new approach that we did last year, we always knew that was going to take some time to come to fruition."
Also helping Williams is what Claire described as "fantastic" correlation between the data in the wind-tunnel back at Grove and that gathered on track, which will encourage them to continue bringing new parts.
But having now made an apparent breakthrough, Williams concedes there is still a lot to do to bring the team back into strong midfield contention.
"I think George has explained it as taking five steps back to move 10 steps forward," she stated.
"It definitely feels like that and it has been a long wait to be able to see it [progress], but we knew we were going to have to wait if we were going to see the benefit.
"You can get a bit lost in a loop sometimes in aero, so it was a case of taking those steps back and now I think we’re definitely seeing that we can move forward, hopefully quickly.
"It certainly feels that we are in a much better position than we’ve been and it’s now just about continuing that development path that we’re on and hoping we can continue to close down the gap to P9."
