SEPANG, Malaysia -- Max Verstappen is hoping he can finally capitalise on a strong Saturday performance after qualifying third fastest for the Malaysian Grand Prix.
The Dutchman, who celebrated his 20th birthday on Saturday, has been ultra impressive in qualifying this season to hold a commanding 11-4 record over teammate Daniel Ricciardo but it's been a completely different story on race day where he has endured some wretched luck. Verstappen has retired from seven of the past 12 races -- mostly through mechanical gremlins -- to find himself a whopping 96 points adrift of Ricciardo in the championship standings.
He will line up on the grid behind Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen and is already focussing on scoring valuable points for Red Bull after a long run of bad luck.
"From my side I want to have a good Sunday, finally," Verstappen said. "Every time on Saturday it is going well but Sunday I haven't scored a lot of points. If it rains I think we have a good opportunity."
It has been a rollercoaster weekend so far for Red Bull. On Friday, they were comfortably ahead of the field in practice one's wet conditions before falling 0.8s behind the Ferraris once the track dried. Tweaks overnight allowed them to unlock additional pace in FP3 before going on to lock out the second row in qualifying.
It must be noted that Red Bull was aided by a turbo failure on Sebastian Vettel's car which cropped up during Q1 and forced him to sit out the rest of the session.
"The whole weekend has been a bit up and down in terms of happiness with the car," said Verstappen. "Really happy we managed to do a good qualifying again, the car [was performing well] except maybe the final run in Q3."