Ferrari will introduce an upgrade package at the Spanish Grand Prix that team principal Mattia Binotto hopes will respond to Red Bull’s development – and he says that should be impacted by the budget cap soon.

Red Bull made a clear step forward with new parts brought to Imola and duly dominated that race weekend, before Max Verstappen won again in Miami despite starting third behind the two Ferraris. Binotto says the trend is that Red Bull has developed its car more than Ferrari over the opening part of the season, but he says he can’t see how that can continue given budget cap restraints.

“First I always said that we should wait five races at least to assess the proper competitiveness between the cars,” Binotto said. “Now, five races has gone. We are leading both championships which is great so we should not be too disappointed, but it’s true that Red Bull improved their car, improved it since the very start of the season while they introduced upgrades, and if I look at the last two races, maybe they got a couple of tenths per lap faster to us.

“It’s no doubt that in order to keep the pace we will need to develop ourselves with new upgrades. I hope because there is a budget cap that at some stage Red Bull will stop developing otherwise I would not understand how they can do that, but let’s see in the next races.

“It could at least be our turn, try to develop the car as much as we can by introducing upgrades and I think it’s not a surprise that we may have a package in Barcelona which will be important for us.

“As usual, I hope the package we are introducing is working as expected and in that case, it can be a good boost in order to try and catch up the current gap we’ve got to the Red Bull.”

While Red Bull’s approach of regular new parts has so far proven beneficial in giving it a slight performance advantage over Ferrari, Binotto says his team doesn’t have the financial capacity to do the same.

“We don’t have the money to spend on upgrades at each single race so I think that’s as simple as that. Not because of reliability but because of the budget cap, so we somehow try to focus the developments on when we believe it’s the right moment and the right spending.”