Max Verstappen said he enjoyed driving his new car in testing - but faces a nervous wait to see whether it is another title-winning racing machine.

The Dutchman heads into 2025 hoping to make more history by becoming only the second F1 racer ever to win five drivers' titles in a row. The only other man ever to achieve that was when he did it with between 2000-04.

got the chance to put his new car through its paces over a four-hour session on Wednesday. And he is taking part in the whole day's running on Friday to help him get as used to the RB21 as possible before the first race of the season in Melbourne on March 16.

Speaking before that final day of running, the Dutchman sounded more positive about the car than he often was about his car in 2024, after Red Bull lost their way by unbalancing their car with a major pre-season update which ended up scuppering their constructors' title defence.

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"So far I've done half a day, but I enjoyed the driving bit," the 27-year-old said. "The car was quite decent to drive, to be honest. In terms of pace, it's always difficult to say, but I enjoyed it, I guess that's the most important part of it. It was a bit more predictable.

"This time last year around here, it wasn't that bad. But I do think that the team learned a lot from last year so now we just try to address that from last year and see how it goes when we go to ."

As alluded to by Verstappen, the RB20 began the 2024 season as the class of the field and the Dutchman won seven of the first 10 races. But it was at that point that other teams had developed their machines to equal and better Red Bull's car, which had become unpredictable and unstable on track.

They spent the rest of the year trying to right what they had done wrong with a major update introduced at Imola and it cost them the constructors' title. They finished third behind and Ferrari, but they could take some solace from Verstappen retaining the drivers' championship thanks to his storming start to the year.

While he does not yet know how competitive his team's latest creation will be, relative to the new cars built by their rivals, Verstappen remains optimistic for now. He said with a smirk: "It can't be worse than last year.

"I think the direction that we are working in is good so we just need to follow that and see how much we can extract out of that. But at the moment it's really early days, there's a lot of things that we are still discussing and wanting to improve. But yesterday I enjoyed it and that's already a big difference to last year."