Max Verstappen took pole position Australian Grand Prix

Overall, it was a pretty good qualifying. It’s been tough this weekend to get the tyres in a good window to push straight away, but it all worked out in Q3 and the last run was good. I’m very happy with the lap and to be on pole position here in Australia. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, it’s going to be an interesting race that’s for sure. We need a clean start, and after that, hopefully we can do a good job. I’ve been on the podium here before but this time I want to be on a different step.

Today was a day to forget. We have a technical issue that we’re trying to get to the bottom of, we had the same issue this morning and we thought we fixed it, but as soon as I hit the braking zone it was clear we hadn’t. It’s very unfortunate what happened today but together as a team, we’ll do our best to fix it ahead of tomorrow’s race. On a track that is hard to overtake, it will be tough, but I will do what I can to get some good points for the team and work hard to get us into a good position.

Qualifying was good, we built the pace well throughout and maximised the performance. Q1 was ok and we ended up in P15, but we were able to take another step each lap. For Q2, we had planned to do two push laps, but unfortunately, the weighbridge stopped me from completing my second lap. Considering I only had one flying lap, I'm pleased with it and the increase in performance by my team. I'm looking forward to the race tomorrow, we haven’t done any long-run testing, but we will aim to extract the maximum out of the car to be able to score points.

It's been a positive session and it’s nice to get into Q2, especially with the new upgrades we brought this weekend. The changing conditions were quite tricky, in particular for the tyre warm-up, and in the last run in Q2, we didn’t adapt enough to what needed to be done. In practice, the tyres continued to improve, but as the track evolved, there was a little drop-off where you needed to make sure the tyres were ready for the last lap. I am a little gutted because we didn’t optimise the last run, but overall, it was a happy session. For tomorrow, we didn’t get much of an opportunity to test our long runs, but I am looking forward to racing and hopefully scoring points.