Max Verstappen has given further insight into the "health scare" he suffered in the run up to the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

Ahead of the Saudi weekend, the Dutchman revealed that feeling unwell he had postponed his original flight to Jeddah and on arrival was given leave to skip media duties.

Still not feeling 100% he also missed the team debrief after qualifying, a move that Nico Rosberg incorrectly assumed to be the Dutchman's petulant reaction to the driveshaft issue that prevented him getting through to Q3.

Speaking in Melbourne today, the world champion gave further insight to his illness.

"I refused to believe it myself for a long time because at home I was really ill," he told reporters, "I could barely walk around and it felt like I was missing a lung.

"I got to the weekend really believing it was gone," he continued, "because normally when you get sick then two or three days after you're alright and you can do your workouts, but then when I jumped in the car in FP1 even just one performance lap I felt like I had to recover for two laps to breathe normally.

"So it definitely did affect me throughout the weekend, which I didn't like because it was one of the first races that I was physically limited, and that's really frustrating when you're in the car."

Confident that he has fully recovered, he said: "Since then I've been trying to work on it, trying to improve it, and I do think that it has improved a lot. So normally this weekend should be alright, I think it was just all coming together in Jeddah, it's quite a tough track in general, when you don't feel well it hits hard on you.

"But these things unfortunately happen, you catch a virus and stuff, so hopefully from now onwards for the rest of the year I should be OK."

Claiming that the Dutchman had suffered a "health scare" at the time, Pitpass was accused by one reader of "click baiting", while another helpfully revealed that "Max has the squirts and missed his flight" calling on us to "do better".

Check out our Thursday gallery from Melbourne here.