Gary Anderson on the Williams revival

When Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas parked their cars on the front row of the grid in Austria, I can guarantee that there was not a single person in the paddock, me included, who did not feel a sense of satisfaction that, at long last, Williams is back where it belongs.

Yes, it was beaten on race day, but with the current form of Mercedes, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton, I believe third and fourth was the best Williams could hope for.

For me, the name Williams Grand Prix Engineering represents a family of racers. Where else on the Formula 1 grid do you see that?

The long relationship between Frank Williams and Patrick Head was one of the most successful partnerships in the history of motorsport. But when Patrick decided to step back, ceding the role of technical director in 2004, Williams slumped into the doldrums.

F1 is not easy. Success doesn't come just because you were once one of the most successful teams there has ever been. It requires leadership that works and motivates everyone from the person who sweeps the floors - or the 'floor manager' as they are probably called in F1 - to the person leading the team. Everyone is more productive when everyone is working efficiently.

Claire Williams now leads the team. But there is not a day when Frank is not in his office and he will know everything about what is going on.

When the team could barely buy a point last year, the family and senior management recognised that a change was required and out went technical director Mike Coughlan.

In the 1990s, Symonds was helping Benetton and Michael Schumacher beat Williams to championships © LAT

The decision to appoint Pat Symonds was a wise one. Not only was he available relatively quickly thanks to his status as effectively a consultant technical director at Marussia, but he has vast experience.

From his days with Benetton/Renault, he knows how to win both races and world championships. During those years, he was often a thorn in the side of the team that now employs him.

F1 team-building is like a complex jigsaw. After Head stepped down, Williams still had all the pieces necessary but it had no one to put them together in the right order. Sam Michael and Mike Coughlan tried, but knowing both of them as I do I think they were a bit like me: they wanted to be a bit too close to the action and didn't step back and look at the big picture.

Enter Pat Symonds. I wouldn't say Pat is exceptional in any single area but he is proficient across the board. That means he knows when he is being bullshitted.

It is vitally important for a team to focus its efforts in the right areas. You need to be able to identify what provides the best bang for your buck as far as performance is concerned and not spend all your time trying to reinvent the wheel. Pat also knows that no matter how fast you are, you must never neglect reliability.

Pat is one of the old boys. He is not doing this for his career. Instead, he is using his career and his experience and discipline to be able to stand back and steer a large group of very clever individuals in one direction.

If that is the right direction, they will all get tremendous satisfaction out of success. Locking out the front row and finishing third will have given them a taste of that.

I spoke with Pat on the way to the first test of 2014 at Jerez. I asked him how the winter period with the new regulations had been and his reply was matter of fact: as a team Williams had achieved everything it had set out to.

Williams looked promising from the start of testing © LAT

Every other team talked of how tough it was. But not Pat. He was cool and calm. Everything on the job list had been ticked off and now it was about addressing the new problems that were inevitably going to pop up.

When I saw the car running for the first time it looked good. It had a strong front end, turned in well and was able to hug the apex. This is a very important characteristic for any racing car.

If a car has inherent understeer, the driver just has to sit and wait for the front end to grip and you can't hustle it to try to achieve a better laptime. Sometimes, it can be at the expense of overworking the rear tyres and I think the Williams is now just the right side of that critical balance.

Together with the Williams family, Pat decided to bring in Rob Smedley from Ferrari as head of vehicle performance. Rob brings a lot of experience from his Ferrari days, and hopefully a little bit from his days working with me at Jordan.

His role is vitally important because to improve you must identify the car's weaknesses and address these areas. In the background, you can have your normal development plan progressing but every car, no matter how good it is, has an inherent weakness on track.

If this is not identified and rectified then all those normal development components just wash into the grey area and fail to realise their potential. As you will have heard from his Ferrari radio conversations with Massa in the past, Rob's a northern boy who says it like it is.

For any team, the two guys you have in the hot seat are the end-user of a product created by the company. In Massa and Bottas, Williams has two end-users who, if the product is correct, will deliver results.

It is a bit like any company making any product. If it doesn't do the job it is intended to do, people don't buy it and the company disappears.

Williams was once in danger of this. But by making a few difficult decisions, it now has a product that can mix it with the best.