Williams F1 team believes it is making up ground on Ferrari

Valtteri Bottas held off Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen in the final stint of the race to finish fourth while he team-mate Felipe Massa recovered to sixth having qualified ninth.

"It was an important weekend for us that we were able to see that we could primarily keep pace with everybody," said Smedley, whose team brought an updated bodywork package to Barcelona.

"We have kept the gap with Mercedes and arguably moved closer to Ferrari, at least in this race.

"We are also a little bit further ahead of Red Bull.

"This is not a circuit we expected to suit us particularly well, so I think it's been a good result overall."

Bottas finished 14 seconds behind the leading Ferrari of Sebastian Vettel at Barcelona and he believes Williams is close to matching the Scuderia's pace.

"We're not too far away," said Bottas. "I think we closed the gap here a little bit.

"If we still want to fight with them in the race, we need more updates to the car.

"But they are on the way and we just need to make sure we improve more than them."

Despite closing the gap on Ferrari, Bottas conceded that catching pace-setter Mercedes will be tricky.

"They are still clearly number one and they are still in a very strong position," said the Finn.

"This year they are going to be really tough to get.

"Of course we will do everything we can to improve the car but I think this race indicates that they are still number one at the moment."