George Russell says he attempted a different tyre warm-up procedure on his final run in Q3 in a bid to improve his lap time, but the stratagem unfortunately proved unsuccessful.
Russell ended his first qualifying of 2022 ninth in the pecking order and a whopping 1.658s adrift of Ferrari poleman Charles Leclerc.
The Mercedes driver knew that his car did not have the speed to challenge for pole, with teammate Lewis Hamilton setting only the fifth fastest time in the Saturday evening session in Bahrain.
He three felt compelled to try something different to try and extract more speed from his ill-handling W13 Silver Arrow.
©Mercedes
"I just tried something different – we only had one set of tyres," Russell told Sky F1.
"I really pushed on my out lap, I got to Turn 1 and I just had no grip. I went one second slower than I did in Q2 and I was expecting to go a couple of seconds faster.
"It was a real shame, I’m glad I tried something but it’s easy [to criticise] in retrospect. We know we’re not where we want to be, P9 is much lower down on where the car is.
"We’re doing everything we can to try get the car back up front fighting the Ferraris and the Red Bulls. Not ideal but the race day is tomorrow."
Russell admitted that despite the Mercedes team's efforts, progress is currently hard to come by.
"I feel like we’re going one step forward and two steps back," he said.
"We feel like we’re making progress but then suddenly we’re back into the same issues that we faced.
"It’s difficult because we’re so focused on solving the over-arching issue of a car that is difficult to nail down on the details and fine-tune the thing.
"This is what it’s about at the moment, we know we want to be fighting for victories and we need to try everything we can to do that."
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