Verstappen sees 'plenty of room for improvement'

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Red Bull's reigning champion Max Verstappen ended Friday practice second quickest just behind Ferrari's Charles Leclerc, and he's confident that there's more to come from the RB18 in Jeddah.

"It seems like Ferrari were quite competitive again," he said after the end of FP2. "We still have a little bit of work to do to catch up with them and there’s plenty of room for improvement

Although it appeared that Verstappen wasn't able to get a completely pristine lap on the soft compound tyres due to traffic and gusty wind conditions, he was satisfied that they had done all they needed to.

Read also: Leclerc fastest in Jeddah FP2, but both Ferraris clip the wall

“The sessions ran quite smoothly today, we completed our programme and tried out lots of different tyre sets," he said.

"The track feels pretty much the same as last year," he continued. "The barriers have moved slightly and in terms of visibility [but] it hasn’t made a noticeable impact.

"Looking ahead to qualifying, we still need to look at some data, we’ll see how it all goes tomorrow.”

It was also a good day for his team mate Sergio Perez, who improved from seventh place in first practice to fourth under the floodlights, only four hundredths of a second slower than his Ferrari counterpart Carlos Sainz.

"It was difficult to get the lap in I needed to see exactly how we will perform over one lap here, because I had a lot of traffic out there.

“We ran both cars on different programmes and I think we got the data we needed, so now we have some work to do tonight.

"It could be another straight shootout with Ferrari on Saturday [in qualifying] but at the moment we are focusing on ourselves. Hopefully tomorrow we are able to make the steps we’d like with the car.

"It will be important in qualifying to make sure we get the space for a clean lap, because traffic can be a bit difficult around here," he added. "We need to make sure we are on it."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.