Spanish GP: Williams F1 team says upgrades closed Ferrari gap

Valtteri Bottas qualified fourth, behind the two Mercedes and Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel, with his team-mate Felipe Massa ninth after making a mistake on his Q3 lap.

Williams performance chief Rob Smedley said: "It's definitely been about upgrades this weekend.

"The first impressions from qualifying is that everything on the car is working so I'm happy.

"We have put ourselves in a favourable position with Ferrari.

"They are ahead of us in the championship and ahead in terms of pace but they are not insurmountable."

Smedley said the team has mainly brought bodywork updates with a lot of work focused on the front underbody of the chassis.

"We brought a package around that area of the car in order to improve driveability and headline downforce and we're confident we have done both," he said.

PROGRESS WITH TYRE PROBLEMS

Williams has struggled with getting its tyres into the right operating window, and thus found its pace tails off after a few laps of each race stint.

But Smedley believes the team is getting on top of the problem.

"We are getting better all the time. Yesterday the long-run pace was good so hopefully we can convert it into some good points tomorrow."

Bottas agreed: "I'm happy that we can now work much better with the medium.

"I think the hard tomorrow is going to be difficult for everyone, it's just slower and there's not much more tyre life in the hard, but you have to use it at some point.

"We have really made progress again in terms of where we operate the tyres in the temperatures. The temperatures were really spot in qualifying and that really helped us."

MASSA STRUGGLES

Williams decided to send Massa out for a second run in Q2 because it was not sure the Brazilian's time was good enough to progress.

Massa felt it was the wrong decision, but Smedley said it was not worth taking the risk.

"I didn't have a clean lap on first set of tyres," said Massa. "The team was a little bit afraid and decided to go again, but it wasn't necessary, the laptime was enough to pass anyway."

Smedley countered: "You have got to take risks but they have got to be sensible risks. We didn't want to leave him out in Q2."

Massa said wind contributed to his subsequent disappointing Q3 run.

"I got to corner three, the wind pushed me a little wide," he said.

"I did not want to back off and lose a bit of time and then when I touched the green part on the outside of the corner, it just pushed me completely out of the track and I lost maybe eight tenths."