If you remember, she actually mentioned that in her Bully Speech at the end of Caretaker. So any similar reference she made after that, could be attributed to keeping the crew on the optimistic side, but in reality, was nothing new at all.
The silver dudes were ahead, likely for the most part, because of the enhanced warp drive that they developed (not elaborated on what it was exactly), which didn't happen on Voyager. It's interesting to consider that the copies, being exact duplicates of the originals, down to the memory engrams, would have thought of something like this and our actual heroes didn't. Perhaps, one can just attribute it to a momentary flash of insight silver Torres or Seven had, conceivable even if they were working with the same basic material. It's also possible that the drive hadn't made that much of a difference, as it may very well have only been online for a short time before the terminal truth was discovered, and the reason for the discrepancy in the ships' relative positions, was that silver Voyager took advantage of anomalies or alien devices that Voyager never even encountered on their flight path.
