Verstappen not happy despite pole in Miami: 'It's really not fun like this'

Max Verstappen may be dominating the Grand Prix weekend in Miami so far, but it is not all coming naturally for the Red Bull Racing driver. As a result, he says he is having little fun driving at the Miami International Autodrome.

Earlier, Verstappen expressed little joy from his flying laps in qualifying, despite his pole position. "For some reason, it's just extremely difficult to make the tyres work around the whole lap. Sometimes you have little moments here and there and it's just not very consistent, let's say like that," he explained.

"That makes it very difficult to, let's say, try and hit a perfect lap. So every lap that you put on the board was a bit of guessing what was going to happen, which doesn't make it very, let's say, nice to drive. But we, I think, handled the situation well. We did the best we could. And the car definitely felt a little bit nicer compared to yesterday."

Verstappen not happy despite pole in Miami

It is frustrating for Verstappen because he does not know exactly where the problem lies. "It's just super unpredictable. It's quite frustrating. I mean, it's not really fun to drive like that. But I can't tell you what went wrong because I did the same thing, and then you come out of corners, and you suddenly lose one-tenth or whatever, and you go, ‘Alright, it's a bit less grip'," he said.

"Some qualifiers, you go in and say, ‘Okay, I can improve here or there, the tyres are quite consistent, you can just push.’ Here, it just feels like you have no idea what you're going to get, and that makes it really difficult. I mean, my first sector was a little bit better. But then the middle sector just fell away from me again for whatever reason," he continued his explanation.

Verstappen: 'It's the track, the tyres, the car, the weather'

According to Verstappen, all factors contribute to the bad feeling he is experiencing. "I think it's everything. So the track, the tyres, the car, the weather, just a very low grip. They overheat very quickly for whatever reason," the championship leader continued. He thinks Pirelli's tyre selection is somewhat conservative - the hardest compounds have been chosen for the Miami GP - but at the same time he sees that the tyres are overheating anyway.

"I would like more two-stops, three-stops. I think it's a lot more fun than having a straightforward one-stop, it's not really that challenging for the teams and drivers. When you have a race, like in China, you can do a two-stop, I think it just opens up a bit more flexibility in the pit windows, and things are a lot more fun," Verstappen explained.

"So maybe we could try to go softer, but we have to speak to Pirelli about that. I don't know if they want to do that, but it's a lot of things that come to mind that make it very tricky around here. I think the cornering speeds are also super low, so if your tyre is a little bit out of the window and you slide a little bit, you immediately lose a lot of lap time in a low-speed corner. So if we would have a few more fast corners, that would be, in general, always a bit more preferred," concluded the three-time world champion.