Red Bull's Max Verstappen says the team's performance "cannot be worse" than they were in Bahrain as they look ahead to the Chinese Grand Prix.
The Dutch driver kicked off his 2019 season with a podium finish at the season-opener in Australia and followed that up with fourth in Bahrain, but struggled in qualifying with the Haas of Kevin Magnussen just one-hundredth shy of Verstappen's Q3 time.
Verstappen reckons the team made some setup mistakes and is therefore hopeful of a better performance at F1's 1,000th race in China next weekend.
"It cannot be worse than what we showed here," he replied when asked for his thoughts ahead of the next race.
"We made some mistakes in terms of setup so I think if you look back to Australia we were quite happy, we were still 20 seconds off to Valtteri, but in that race I couldn’t go and push like I wanted to because I was always held up by other cars.
"I think we can do a lot better than what we have showed so far."
Bahrain is currently hosting a two-day in-season test which Verstappen reckons has come at a good time for Red Bull, to help it understand its car better and hone its setup.
Verstappen ended the session fastest on Tuesday and completed 62 laps, with rookie Daniel Ticktum taking over on Wednesday.
"We did a good amount of laps to understand what went wrong on the weekend," he added. "I think we learned a lot from it already, so in that way, I think it's very positive.
"We don't have that many days anyway to understand the car. During the weekend it all goes that quick [so] doing a day like this is very helpful."
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