After a nightmare opening day at Imola, world champion Max Verstappen fears that rivals are closing the gap.

Complaining about his car almost from the outset, the Red Bull driver went off twice in the opening practice session and once again in the second, even though his team had spent the entire break checking his car for issues and changing the set-up.

Ending the day seventh quickest, and over half-a-second off the pace, the Dutchman hopes that things improve.

"I guess it can't be worse than what we had today, right?" he replied, when asked about his prospects for qualifying.

"We'll look at a few things that we can do better," he added. "But yeah, it looks a bit like the others took a bit of a step forward.

"From our side just a bad day. A difficult day...

"Just difficult to get a good balance and just not really feeling comfortable in the car, moving around a lot," he continued. "It's very easy to lose the car, so we have a few things that we have to look at because today definitely, just bad, just not comfortable.

"Also the long run was really bad," he added, "so definitely a few things that we have to improve if we want to be competitive tomorrow. Today we were just severely off the pace that we need to fix."

Check out our Saturday gallery from Imola here.