Ferrari's technical director Pat Fry says the team is closing the gap to the top

Ferrari ran a major update package at the Spanish Grand Prix two weeks ago. Despite Fernando Alonso finishing second at Barcelona and showing good pace during Thursday practice in Monaco, Fry warned that catching the frontrunners won't be easy.

"I don't think you can say that we are there based on Spain," said Fry when asked by AUTOSPORT when he expects Ferrari to be consistently at the front.

"We did make a reasonable improvement. If anything, we have closed the gap on the cars ahead of us but by no means are we the quickest one. Until we are the quickest, we are not going to be happy.

"We have got a few little updates here, some more for Canada and then it's just a relentless pace [and a question of] how quickly you can update your car. And that depends on what other people are doing as well."

Despite believing that Ferrari made a bigger step in Spain than the rest of the field, Fry warned that maintaining such a dramatic rate of improvement will be difficult as the car gets stronger.

He added that the Barcelona package did not work perfectly and that it won't be until the Canadian Grand Prix in two weeks time that Ferrari is able to find out if subsequent tweaks have unleashed its full potential.

"Catching up in Spain was a little bit easier for us because we were starting from a bad starting point. But we did manage to put on more performance there than most of the other teams. We have just got to keep that up.

"Most of the things worked but were still some that weren't doing exactly what we were expecting. You can't really test anything here. Here, it's just about keeping the car the same and the drivers getting used to the track again.

"We'll answer the next set of questions when we get to Canada."