George Russell felt that he had been in contention for a top starting position for Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix, only for the Mercedes driver to make the smallest of mistakes on his final qualifying lap that proved to have big consequences.
While the two Red Bulls were clearly too far ahead to be denied a front row lock-out this weekend, Russell had believed that a place on the second row of tomorrow's grids was within his reach.
"It was so tight out there between ourselves, the McLarens, the Ferraris, and the Aston Martins," he said. "After FP3, we knew there would only be one tenth or two between all those cars - and so it proved."
Instead, Russell will find himself lining up in ninth place on the grid tomorrow for the start of the fourth race of the 2024 season. For the first time in 2024, he was even out-qualified by his team mate Lewis Hamilton in seventh.
"If you didn't do a great lap you would end up P9 and that is what happened with me today," he admitted. "When it comes to that one lap in qualifying, if you nail it or you don't quite nail it can be the difference of six positions.
"I made a mistake on my final lap," he said. "I was on a really strong lap, 0.25s up by turn 11 and expecting to maybe finish 0.4s ahead. Made one small mistake and lost all the time. That was a bit of a shame."
"It's a little bit disappointing, but that is how it goes sometimes," he acknowledged. Without the mistake he felt that he would have potentially qualified inside the top five.
Russell was lucky not to be starting even further back than P9 after race stewards investigated him for an unsafe release in pit lane during Q1. Ultimately the team was fined €5000 but Russell himself avoided a grid penalty.
Once again, the team's early hopes of a strong weekend after Friday practice had seemed to fizzle away on Saturday when the attention turned to single lap speed trials, which Russell said was due to the nature of the Suzuka track.
"We know the strengths and weaknesses of our car. The weakness is high-speed corners," he explained. "When you get to qualifying and the fuel comes out, the speeds are going higher, higher and higher, and that sort of runs away from us.
"In the race, you're probably going around the corners 30kmh slower in a high speed, which brings it back into more of a medium-speed corner rather than a high-speed corner.
"We're a long way off in the high speed compared to what we're seeing back at base, so we need to get on top of that," he said. "It's good it's been exposed this early in the season.
"It gives us the understanding of the platform we are building on and adding performance to. It sets a clear direction for us to improve.
"We're definitely doing more drastic test items at the moment to try and get on top of this high-speed performance, and the car is correlating well in low speed and medium speed."
He said that the team's had been highlighted by the number of high-speed circuits at the start of the 2024 season with Jeddah, Melbourne and now Suzuka all being problematic for the W15.
"We've started this season with several high-speed circuits. We know that is where our weakness is with this car, and we knew this weekend wouldn't be our best.
"With the nature of this calendar, we've had three circuits in a row that are all high speed," he explained. "If we'd started the season at Bahrain, Baku and Singapore, we'd probably be talking a very different picture."
"We headed to Japan focused on trying to make the car more consistent and drivable over the weekend," commented Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.
"Pleasingly it looks like we've made some progress in that regard. We'd be a lot happier of course if we were a tenth quicker, that would have put us several positions higher up on the grid.
"The reality at the moment though is we are the wrong side of a tight bunch of cars and need to find some more performance.
"Despite that, we have halved our gap to pole position from last year and can also be encouraged by the fact that even small steps forward will move us up the grid.
"This is a race where you can move forward if you have good pace. We will be looking to make the most of the car we have, execute our strategy well, and hopefully finish higher up than where we are starting."
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