Max Verstappen believes Red Bull has “a good direction” to close down Ferrari after practice at the Australian Grand Prix.
The Scuderia led both sessions at Albert Park but the Dutchman would improve to split Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz to finish P2 in FP2.
Once again, this weekend appears to be a case of Ferrari’s cornering vs. Red Bull’s straight-line speed with each team having a big advantage over the other in their respective strength.
But Verstappen believes Red Bull can make enough progress to close the quarter of a second advantage Leclerc held.
“FP1 and the beginning of FP2 we were lacking a bit of balance, then for the final run we changed the car around a bit and I felt a lot happier,” he explained post-session.
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“I had a car in front of me in my final lap so that didn’t help. We are a tiny bit off Ferrari, but I think over the weekend we will maybe make it a bit closer. You never know for tomorrow but so far they seem again very strong.
“We still have a bit of work to do but we are more or less there. In the long run, everything looked quite stable and quite nice, so I am happy about that so we definitely made some good improvements today.
“We are in a good direction and we have to build from there and hopefully we can make some tiny adjustments also for tomorrow.”
Teammate Sergio Perez had a different kind of day, testing parts and generally playing a little catch up to those around him.
“It was challenging,” said the Mexican. “I think we did some changes that going into this afternoon we had to analyse, a few things that are not working as expected, so it has been a very difficult day in terms of mileage.
“But I think we have really good data for tonight. There is plenty to work on to try to understand the direction we have taken.
“We are talking about a few tenths and we change our life, so we just have to understand where we are at the moment because we don’t really understand what’s going on with the car at the moment.”
This year, F1 has returned to a very different Albert Park with a number of corners reprofiled and the old Turn 9/10 chicane removed completely.
Asked about the changes, Verstappen replied: “It’s good, I think the track grip is quite nice, the bumps have definitely improved, it’s a bit smoother.
“I think it also makes the track nicer as well because you can attack the corners better now so they did a good job with that and, yeah, I enjoyed my laps today.”