Verstappen: Not an easy day and quite difficult for me

Red Bull's four-time F1 world champion Verstappen ended FP2 outside the top three as teams struggled to gather consistent data due to multiple red flags and challenging conditions around the high-speed circuit.

Verstappen summed up his Friday at Suzuka: “It was quite chaotic for everyone out there with all the red flags. It wasn’t an easy day and it was quite difficult for me. We tried a lot of different things with the car but it seems like a lot of things are not really clicking at the moment, so it's quite difficult to put the lap down.”

The Dutchman, who has won at Suzuka for the past three seasons, revealed his issues were compounded by the limitations of the soft compound tyre and the difficulty of finding a rhythm on the iconic figure-of-eight layout.

Friday's timesheets show that Verstappen's best effort in FP2 was good for P8, albeit a concerning (for Red Bull) 0.556s down on McLaren's pace setter Oscar Piastri in P8.

Verstappen revealed: “I was on the soft tyre, which requires a lot of management, and you can’t really push it so I only got about three laps at the end which wasn’t a great read. You need a lot of confidence and commitment around here. At the moment, I don't feel like I can use that so I still have quite a bit of work to do.”

Despite his own challenges, Verstappen singled out his new teammate Yuki Tsunoda for praise on a day when the promoted Red Bull driver made his debut for the team at his home Grand Prix. The Japanese driver ended the day in P18, but was denied a meaningful lap time amid the interruptions during FP2.

Max said: “I think Yuki started off really well today even though FP1 and FP2 was very chaotic for everyone. Tomorrow in FP3 we can hopefully have a bit of a longer run but overall it hasn’t been an easy day.”

Tsunoda lamented that he was unable to do a clean run in the final session: "We didn’t set a lap time in FP2 due to the number of stops in the session, you could maybe call the session a shambles for everyone.

"Overall, it is ok and I am happy to have confidence in the car. The car feels a bit different to what I felt on the simulator, a bit more than I expected in terms of car feeling, it is a bit more exaggerated in the real car. We still have some work to do," admitted Tsunoda.

With limited representative long-run data collected and confidence still lacking in the RB21’s setup, Verstappen and Red Bull face a crucial FP3 session on Saturday before qualifying at Suzuka, while all eyes are on Tsunoda to see if he can outqualify and beat the man he replaced: Racing Bull's Liam Lawson...