Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen looked to be heading to a front row lock-out for the Belgian Grand Prix after dominating the earlier practice session.
But their qualifying effort went awry in the final minutes when showers hit the Spa-Francorchamps circuit.
Vettel ultimately did enough to hold on to second place on the grid, but he admitted that a certain amount of disorganisation had crept into the team's reaction to the rapidly changing situation.
"It was confusion," Vettel conceded. "It was just not as calm as I think it could have been.
"I guess everybody had in these conditions, swapping tyres, there was a little bit of miscommunication of where to start in the pit lane.
"It was a bit chaotic and not great from a management point of view," he sighed.
"I don't feel we put everything together in the last lap," he offered. "We didn't time it great. It didn't feel as if I got everything out for various reasons, therefore it was a bit of a scrappy session.
"It wasn't a nice ending to a great qualifying up to that point. It's great fun but obviously not very rewarding when you know you could have done a bit better.
"But, look - in these conditions it can be anything. You might as well take second from where we are," he said. "You saw also the others not putting enough fuel for the end, so it can be a lot worse."
Vettel revealed that he also had to manage a battery problem in Q3. "We ran out of battery on the last lap for nearly the whole lap and it was costly.
"I think we had the pace today for pole but we'll never find out," he said. "The gap was quite big so Lewis deserved pole.
"But tomorrow I'm quite sure we have good pace in the car for the race so looking forward to that," he continued. "In the end, as I said, I'm happy with second. First row for tomorrow and we have a strong case, so anything can happen."
Kimi Raikkonen was the biggest casualty of Ferrari's unfortunate stutter. Having topped Q1 and run second in Q2 to Vettel, the Finn tumbled to sixth place in the final round meaning he will start from the third row of the grid tomorrow.
It appeared that Raikkonen didn't have enough fuel left in his car to go for another flying lap when conditions started to improve. He ended up sitting out the final minutes of the session in the Ferrari garage
"When all of a sudden it starts to rain like this, from a team point of view you have to manage two cars," Vettel acknowledged. "Kimi obviously was rushing to get back out."
Raikkonen himself was bemused by what had happened.
"Honestly I don't know what we did, apart from obviously not the best thing," he told reporters afterwards. "We need to see what happened obviously. There was time left, but we needed to pit. Far from ideal.
“I knew how much fuel we had, but honestly I didn’t know we didn’t have time to refuel and go out again,” he added. “I guess we should have stopped when we changed tyres and put more fuel and then we manage to do more laps, but I don’t know reasons why.
“I thought we had time enough anyhow to come in and change, but this is what happened.”
"Obviously it has been good [up to now] but then the end result from so far this weekend has been pretty poor. To be honest I don't even know where we ended up."
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