Reigning World Champion Max Verstappen isn't satisfied with his performance in Australia so far, in spite of returning to the front row for the first time after Jeddah, equalising his best seasonal qualifying so far.

Verstappen said in the post qualifying interview that he has never felt at ease with his RB18 at Albert Park so far:

"Not good. I didn’t really feel good in the car the whole weekend so far.I think there’s not been one lap when I actually felt confident, so a bit of a struggle," said the Dutchman, whose best career result at the track is P3.

After winning in Jeddah, both him and Red Bull have higher expectations for tomorrow's race,especially with Ferrari's Charles Leclerc scoring yet another pole position, even if Verstappen isn't really confident with his car's performance so far:

"Of course, second is still a good result, but just not feeling that great to go to the limit. We’ll try to analyse it."

"Probably in the race pace everything stabilises a bit, but for me this weekend so far it’s been all over the place. I think also as a team we want more.”

He went to explain his main issue, the lack of balance, which has been constantly impacting his performance during the FPs as well, where he wasn't able to finish above P2.

"It's been terrible for me, the whole weekend so far, just not a good balance. All the time chasing something and I never felt comfortable for one lap, except the long runs."

"Just been a big struggle and clearly we didn't seem to really fix it, even in qualifying," said the Red Bull driver who's yet to achieve a pole in 2022 after getting 8 in the last season.

This was an issue for his qualifying as well, as it didn't allow him to extract the best possible performance from his car:

“It just doesn't give you confidence to push. Also, my first run in Q3, I started to feel a bit better and I was actually hooking it up, but then I locked up again in one corner just because of a random balance shift. So it's not been great to be honest.”

However, Verstappen is a bit more hopeful for the race, since the balance issues didn't affect him as much while completing longer runs in practice:

"Probably in the race pace everything stabilises a bit, but for me everything this weekend has been a bit all over the place. Of course, happy to be second but also as a team we want more.”