Daniel Ricciardo admitted to having a "fun" opening day of running in Turkey on Friday, but Saturday's qualifying proved a lot less enjoyable for the McLaren driver.
While teammate Lando Norris charged through to Q3, Ricciardo was left stranded in Q1 due to circumstances and an inability to improve his pace with Pirelli's soft compound.
Ultimately, the Honey Badger was deprived of an access to Q2 by one of McLaren's direct rivals in the championship, Ferrari's Carlos Sainz who, despite starting his race from the back row on Sunday, put in a flyer late in Q1 that knocked Ricciardo from P15 to P16.
"Obviously not where we want to be," said Ricciardo on Saturday. "The track was steadily drying and everyone just kept improving a chunk on that last lap.
"We didn’t make as big a step on that second set of Softs, and we’ve found it tricky with the Soft most of the weekend so it’s just unfortunate to be so far down the grid."
©McLaren
Despite the setback, Ricciardo was confident of devising a way to move forward on Sunday.
"We’ll find a way to come back tomorrow and try to understand the soft tyre a bit better," he said.
"It was probably also a bit of timing, we got quite a few yellow flags in Turn One which put us out of sync early.
"But I’ve already moved on from it, so now we’ll put our head down for the race tomorrow."
McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl echoed his driver's comments on the MCL35M's lack of pace on the soft tyre, but also overall.
"We haven’t made a large step forward on performance and that meant we struggled for pace today – especially on the soft tyres," said the German.
"That resulted in an early end to Daniel’s session, qualifying P16, and Lando, after getting through to Q3 on the medium tyre, qualified P8 and will start P7.
"Tomorrow is another day, we’re expecting dry conditions and will work hard again this evening to see if we can unlock a little more performance in race trim, with the aim of moving both cars forwards."
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