Pierre Gasly was left pondering his fate after his "extremely disappointing" Q1 exit in qualifying at his home race at Paul Ricard, a setback the AlphaTauri charger struggled to understand.
Gasly was hopeful of achieving a strong result in Saturday's qualifying, buoyed by his productive opening day of running on Friday.
But while his AlphaTauri teammate Yuki Tsunoda made it into Q3 and clocked in with the eighth fastest time, Gasly's session was over as early as Q1 despite his best efforts.
The Frenchman admitted that the writing had been on the wall earlier in the day in FP3 when he noted how his car's behaviour had changed from the day before despite his team making only minor changes to the AT03's set-up.
"Yesterday every single lap out there is in the top 10, even by some margin, a couple of tenths in the pocket," he said after qualifying.
"Then today I was going everything all out and we were quite far away from making it to the top 10.
"So at the moment I don’t really understand and I think we need a bit more time with the team to go through everything.”
"I’m extremely disappointed because yesterday was really, really promising and since this morning I’ve just had a completely different feeling with the car.
"We just weren’t fast enough, and at the moment I don’t know why. I was doing clean laps, but the car was sliding a lot in all the slow-speed corners."
Gasly also suffered a moment at the end of Q1 when he nearly spun while on his final hot lap.
"I thought I had a puncture," he said. "I need to check with the guys what exactly happened. But it was not great at all.
"I just need to sit down and go through everything trying to understand why we lost so much performance compared to yesterday."
AlphaTauri's head of vehicle performance Guillaume Dezoteux was also determined to get to the bottom of Gasly's troubles.
"It was a difficult session for Pierre, who couldn't really extract the potential from the car and got knocked out in Q1," he said.
"His last lap was looking good, he was improving a lot compared to his previous attempt, when he lost the car in Turn 6.
"We need to understand with Pierre and the engineers what happened there, because all the car parameters looked normal up to that point."
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