Verstappen wants to improve a "few things" for qualifying

Championship runaway leader Max Verstappen insisted that it has been tough on the opening day at Soa to find the balance as he focused on Sunday's race with his looming grid penalty.

Although Verstappen dominated the opening practice session at Spa, he was unable to beat the McLaren pairing of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri in the second sixty-minute practice.

The Dutchman will serve a grid penalty for taking on a new ICE, his fifth of the year which means that the best possible starting position is P11 should he secure pole position in qualifying.

Although the Dutchman didn’t sound too concerned after the practice sessions on Friday had concluded, he insists that Red Bull will need to find the right compromise between the middle sector and the rest of the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.

“We tried quite a few things today, tweaking and testing the car, because it is typically Spa where of course you have sector one and three where you want the top speed and then a very long middle sector where you want a cornering speed.

"It is always very tricky to find the right balance when you are trying a few things to see what is better. We’ll look at it on the data and analyse the day in debrief. We started off quite positively today and have some things to work on from FP2, so there are a few things to look at.

"Hopefully all the changes that we made will come together, especially as I will be starting near the back for the race because of the engine penalty. However, we will try to optimise this as much as we can. Naturally, you always want a good qualifying, but the race is our focus."

His team-mate Sergio Perez had a quite day at Spa. The Mexican set a 1m44.329s to take seventh in the opening session while the second practice saw him clock a 1m43.504s to end up ninth quickest.

The six-time F1 race winner insists that he and his race engineer Hugh Bird will need to fine-tune the setup for the remainder of the Spa weekend.

"During the practice sessions we have been playing around with the set-up, but haven’t been able to fully extract everything out of the car yet. The Team got plenty of information from today with both cars running quite different and there’s a lot to analyse for tomorrow’s strategy.

"It is going to be an interesting weekend coming up, tomorrow’s qualifying could be potentially wet and Sunday is looking dry at the moment. Going in to the weekend there are still a lot of unknowns so we’ll need to be able to adapt."