Red Bull: Spanish Grand Prix upgrade has closed gap to Ferrari

Despite pre-season hopes of returning to championship contention, Red Bull has been behind Mercedes and Ferrari so far in 2017.

While maintaining that its Renault engine is still at a disadvantage, Red Bull hoped for a noticeable improvement from the major aerodynamic upgrade it has brought to Barcelona.

Red Bull's quickest lap of Friday practice, set by Max Verstappen, was 0.636 seconds off the pacesetting Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton and three tenths slower the lead Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen.

"I think [we are] a little bit happier, but we still need to work very hard to get more pace in the car and the engine," Verstappen said.

"We made a good step forward, we are a little bit closer to Ferrari.

"But I think Mercedes, as well, brought a very good update package, so they are still ahead.

"It is always good to go forward and that is what we did today.

"We definitely gained a bit of grip so that is always positive."

Team-mate Daniel Ricciardo, who lapped a tenth off Verstappen on Friday, had a similar assessment of Red Bull's competitiveness.

"We have made some progress but we knew it wasn't going to put us up with Mercedes or anything," he said.

"I feel we can still perfect what we have got, get a few more tenths out of it.

"Obviously we want more, but we are in line with what we predicted."

The Australian conceded that the car was performing better on the soft Pirelli tyre than the medium, and admitted Red Bull would need to extract more from the update before qualifying if it is to challenge Ferrari.

"The medium at the start of Q2 was a struggle but we found a good chunk on the soft," he said.

"We are getting there. We are feeling a bit of progress so we need to keep finetuning it.

"Looking at Ferrari, we are not too far off them, but I think we are still going to need to make improvements tomorrow if we are going to make a real impression on them in qualifying."