Max Verstappen faced a challenging start to the Australian Grand Prix weekend, finishing seventh in the second practice session at Albert Park. Struggling with grip throughout the day, the reigning world champion ended up more than six-tenths of a second behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who topped the timesheets.

Despite the team introducing a significant upgrade package, Verstappen admitted there is still plenty of work to do to unlock the RB21’s full potential. He emphasised that balance wasn’t the main issue, rather it was the lack of grip that made it difficult to extract performance. Solving this problem in time for qualifying and the race, he acknowledged, would be not easy.

“The balance wasn’t completely wrong, but somehow we didn’t get any grip and it was difficult,” Verstappen explained.

“That’s why we’re not really at the top right now. It’s not really a big balance problem, so it’s going to be difficult to solve. But it’s not like I didn’t expect this today. I’m not surprised by our speed, either positively or negatively.”

He also pointed out that Red Bull has struggled at Albert Park since the resurfacing of the circuit, making it even harder to find the right setup.

His new teammate, Liam Lawson, who finished finished 17th in FP2 and six tenths off Verstappen’s pace, admitted that the team has a lot of work ahead.

“I’m comfortable in the car—just too slow,” he told the official F1 channel.

“We obviously have a lot of work to do overnight. We expected to have some things to figure out, but probably not this much. Now we’ll go over everything and try to make a step forward for tomorrow.”