Red Bull's new F1 car "can't be worse than last year's"

Max Verstappen is confident Red Bull have made progress with their new Formula 1 car after the difficulties they encountered in some races last year.

The reigning world champion covered 400 kilometres in the new RB21 yesterday and is due to spend a full day in it tomorrow. He described his initial impressions as positive.

“So far I’ve done half a day, but I enjoyed the driving bit,” he said. “The car was quite decent to drive, to be honest.

“In terms of pace, it’s always difficult to say, but I enjoyed it, I guess that’s the most important part of it. It was a bit more predictable.”

Red Bull began last season in strong shape: Verstappen won the first race in Bahrain with 25 seconds in hand over his nearest rival from another team. The team’s performance began to dip around mid-season.

“This time last year around here, it wasn’t that bad,” he said. “But I do think that the team learned a lot from last year so now we just try to address that from last year and see how it goes when we go to Australia.”

The team won nine races last year, more than any of their rivals, but failed to continue their run of constructors’ championship successes. Although Verstappen won the drivers’ title, his team mate Sergio Perez finished eighth and scored just one-quarter of the Red Bull’s points total.

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Verstappen became frustrated with his car’s performance at some rounds, while Red Bull went 10 grands prix without scoring a win at one stage. Compared to the difficulties he encountered then, he is sure their new car will be an improvement.

“It can’t be worse than last year,” he said. “I think the direction that we are working in is good so we just need to follow that and see how much we can extract out of that.

“But at the moment it’s really early days, there’s a lot of things that we are still discussing and wanting to improve. But yesterday I enjoyed it and that’s already a big difference to last year.”