Despite serving up one of the best performances of the day, Max Verstappen labels his car a "disaster".

Week after week, session after session, the four-time world champion comes on the radio complaining about something or other. Barely, has he described his car as being "undrivable" than he has posted the pole-winning time, or passed a rival for the lead of the race.

At the weekend, his team admitted that most of the time the Dutchman is actually correct in terms of his criticism, which means they leave Brazil with work to do.

"My God!" he stormed over the radio after taking the chequered flag... a radio which itself has been criticised for the last three races. "Doing 85% of the race with a f***** car!

"P2 is nice but not in this way," he added. "I'm sorry, but what a disaster to drive. I've never experienced something like this in the wet or in the dry. It's really, really bad."

Speaking at the subsequent press conference, Verstappen was only too happy to expand on his criticism.

"When you start that far back, you need to try and, of course, to get by the guys ahead of you as quickly as you can," he explained. "I think that first stint went really, really well. We got very quickly back into the top ten.

"The pace wasn't bad," he continued, "but as soon as I switched to the slicks, I had some extreme amount of oversteer in the car, in the high-speed corners, which made it super difficult to drive.

"We need to understand if something broke on the car, if there was some kind of error, loss or whatever, because this was not normal.

"I sit here, of course, very happy with second, but at the same time, I knew or I know there was more in it if the car would have been in good shape. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I actually did most of the race with a car that was not in good shape. To sit here being second, of course, is fantastic."

Nonetheless, this was the latest in a string of bravura performances at the Interlagos track. In 2024 he started 17th and went on to win, while a year later he finished third after starting in the pitlane. This year, starting from 21st, he finished second.

"Maybe next year, I would love, of course, to start maybe a bit further up front instead of starting from the back or the pit lane," he laughed. "We'll find out next year.

"But it's been good," he added. "In the wet, it probably also gives you a few more opportunities to get by cars, and you can do some different lines and more opportunities.

"That definitely helped me today, but we also have to understand why or what went wrong with the car as soon as we went to the slicks. Because even when I went back to the Inters, at the end, the car was night and day different to my first stint, which shows that there is something wrong."

Check out our Sunday gallery from Interlagos here.