“So far they seem again very strong” – Max Verstappen thinks Ferrari are strong but remains confident that Red Bull will take the fight to the top

Max Verstappen thinks that Ferrari looks very strong after the free practice in Australia but he is confident in his team’s abilities.

Max Verstappen ended the FP2 session behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in Australia. While he thinks that the Ferrari looks very strong in Australia he is confident in his team’s ability to take the fight to the top.

During the free practice session, Verstappen struggled with car balance and his team-mate Sergio Perez suffered from a lack of track time.

“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,” explained Verstappen.

Max Verstappen displaying quite literally every emotion available to a human being today all while discovering the joys of Vegemite.

Australia. It’s good to be back. #AustralianGP | #F1 pic.twitter.com/cM8cDI8zEr

— The Race (@wearetherace) April 7, 2022

“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.”

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Max Verstappen likes the changes to the track

Since the last time F1 raced in Australia the Albert Park circuit has gone through several changes. After the Dutchman’s first outing on the changed track, he praised the track.

He said, “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.”

Meanwhile, his teammate Sergio Perez said that he had a challenging day and his engineers currently don’t really understand the issues.

“It was challenging,” said Perez. “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.”

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