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Max Verstappen was not too thrilled after the first day of running in Abu Dhabi as he felt that the car required a lot of work. The Red Bull driver missed FP1 on Friday because the team fielded two rookies, Jake Dennis and Isack Hadjar. To add to this, the FP2 session was curtailed due to two red flag stoppages.
As a result, Max Verstappen could not get many laps under his belt. The Red Bull driver's single attempt at a qualifying simulation was not as competitive as he would have wanted it to be.
Overall, Verstappen was a couple of tenths down on the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc. In the timings, the Dutchman was P3 with both Charles Leclerc and the McLaren of Lando Norris ahead of him. The driver was hoping to make improvements to the car in the coming session as he felt that it was just not properly hooked up to the track.
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Talking to F1TV, the reigning World Champion said:
"I think from our side the balance was very off, a lot of understeer, a lot of jumping, so definitely a few things to figure out for tomorrow. A lot to figure out for FP3 to be good in qualifying, but we’ll see.
"I didn’t expect it to be so far off, so that’s also a bit of a question mark for us. We’re still P3, it’s not too bad, but balance-wise I think it can be a lot better, so we’ll try and have a look at what happened there."
Max Verstappen's teammate unsure of the real picture in the pecking order
With not many laps done by any of the teams, Max Verstappen's teammate Sergio Perez was still not sure whether there was a clear idea of what the pecking order was going to be.
Talking to F1TV after the session, the Mexican said:
“We had to do some tweaks to it, I was struggling a bit with [the] front-end initially, but obviously we hardly got any running, especially on the medium [tyre], then on my soft run I had traffic with people doing high fuel [runs] in the end."
He added:
“It wasn’t a very straightforward day, obviously, with not running in FP1, so very short running. We know we have to be very careful on which route we take because I think when I did my lap [on softs] the tyres were on the hot side, so not very representative at that point.”
Max Verstappen is targeting what will be his 19th win of the season, a record that is going to take some beating in the future. Perez, meanwhile, sits second in the standings — 279 points behind his teammate but 41 ahead of third-placed Lewis Hamilton.
