A livid Romain Grosjean blamed what he saw as an unfair grid penalty for ruining his race at the Bahrain Grand Prix.
The Frenchman and his Haas team were critical of the stewards for a three-place grid drop for impeding Lando Norris in qualifying, dropping him to 11th place.
And it got worse as Grosjean turned into Lance Stroll at Turn 2 on the opening lap with the resulting puncture dropping him down the field and later into the second retirement in two races.
“I won’t tell you exactly what I think because it’s not going to go well,” he was quoted by PlanetF1 post-race referring to the stewards also opting not to penalise the Racing Point driver.
“That’s always the risk when you start not where you want to start, and I think we should’ve started eighth today.
“We were sorry [about blocking Norris] and yes, we didn’t do correctly yesterday, but in the end, it didn’t change Lando’s qualifying, didn’t change ours and obviously starting 11th today ruined our race.”
For Grosjean, the tough start to 2019 is unwelcomely similar to 2018, when he failed to score points until the Austrian Grand Prix despite a strong car.
“At the minute a bit copy-paste from last year,” he said. “But we’re strong and we always came back, so next race is going to be better.”
Across the garage, the situation wasn’t much better for Kevin Magnussen as the Dane fell from P6 in qualifying to a lowly 13th in the race.
“It’s unbelievable how slow we were, and we have no understanding yet. Amazingly slow,” team boss Guenther Steiner was quoted by GPFans.com.
“It looks like we didn’t get the tyres to work on the long runs, but then again, by no means is that a conclusion. At least we’ve got the time to go through testing on Tuesday and Wednesday and hopefully learn something.”