Ask Helmut Marko about the evolution of the RB21 this season and he’ll tell you that the team has made a breakthrough in Saudi Arabia. 

But while driver Max Verstappen has acknowledged that the car is “a bit better,” he’s still expecting a tough weekend ahead.

What did Red Bull’s Max Verstappen say after FP2 at Saudi Arabian GP?

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

To call last weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix a disaster for Red Bull Racing might be an understatement. Though both Max Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda finished in the top 10, the challenges facing the RB21 were only exacerbated by the track conditions.

But at the high-speed Jeddah Corniche circuit, things are looking up — to the point where the team’s senior advisor Helmut Marko praised it as “the best Friday for quite a while.”

“We made different setups and, for the qualifying lap, it’s working. We are much closer to the McLarens,” Marko told media including PlanetF1.com.

Of course, there’s still plenty of work to do. Marko pointed out that on long runs, tyre degradation is still a problem, as is balance — but the team has “made a step forward” and believes that over the course of one lap, the RB21 has what it takes to square up with the team in papaya.

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That being said, reigning champion Max Verstappen still sounds quite guarded about the car’s performance.

“We tried some different things with the car trying to find maybe a different direction with it, and I think we learned a lot from it,” he told media after the race.

The downside? “It’s still not where I wanted it to be.”

“Personally I don’t really look at the gaps,” Verstappen explained.

“I think in the end of the day, you have to just go from your own feeling and what you feel in the car over one lap. It’s a bit better, but then the long runs, they were very tough still for us.”

While Marko might be confident that Red Bull can match McLaren over the course of a single fast lap, though, Verstappen isn’t quite so sure.

When asked for his predictions for qualifying, the Dutch champion responded: “It’s difficult to say, really.

“I think one standout is of course McLaren being very competitive, but from our side, there’s still quite a bit of work to do and things to understand.”

Still, Verstappen set the third-fastest time in practice, which nestled him just behind the McLarens in the running order at the end of the session.

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