Valtteri Bottas rued a difficult Q3 as he was pipped to pole by Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton in Monaco.
The Finn had been faster throughout the weekend and appeared to have set a tough target of 1m10.2s for the world champion to beat.
However, as Hamilton does, he would find the pace by less than a tenth and left Bottas unable to respond.
“We are proud again of getting another one-two, it’s really impressive but my feeling at the moment is that I’m really disappointed with qualifying,” he commented.
“I really felt I had the speed today and felt really good in the car, all day. In the first run, I felt there were still 0.2s or 0.3s I could improve, so I should have done a better job in the first one.
“On the second one I had quite a lot of traffic on the out lap, I had to go off the line in a few places and then the tyres weren’t working at the start of the second lap.”
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With the sensitivity of this year’s Pirelli compounds already well-documented, once behind, Bottas knew there was no coming back.
“Already at T1 I felt the tyres weren’t there and I was going slower and slower on the following corners until I had a big snap coming out of Turn 8 – that was it,” he explained.
“I saw on the big screens, passing the Swimming Pool, Lewis had managed to improve his time, so I knew that was game over.”
Having lost two of the past three starts to Hamilton, Bottas is hoping he can now return the favour on the dash to Sainte Devote on Sunday.
“You always aim for a good start but here there’s a super-short distance from the start to the first corner, so there aren’t many opportunities,” he admitted.
“Obviously the aim is to do a good start and, as a team, we want to be one-two again and for me, it’s going to be about waiting for opportunities in the race.”
