Mercedes were left picking up the pieces after yet another disappointing and frustrating performance in Friday's qualifying session for this weekend's 100km, 19-lap Miami Sprint event.
George Russell and Lewis Hamilton both failed to make it through to the final top ten pole shoot-out round and will start from 11th and 12th respectively for the Saturday race.
Russell missed the cut by 0.013s from Haas' Nico Hulkenberg, while Hamilton clipped the wall on his final flying lap and ended up finishing 0.041s away from the required threshold.
It was far from the outcome that either the drivers or the team had been expecting, having pinned their hopes on a number of upgrades for the W15 that they had brought to the circuit this week.
Russell admitted that he was perplexed as to the reason for the car's current failure to thrive. on race weekends.
“I’m not too sure to be honest," he told the media in the paddock afterward. "In practice the soft tyre was feeling really good on our car, the pace was good. On the medium we just couldn’t get the sweet spot.
“I found myself on the wrong side of it. It was tight out there and we shouldn’t have been in a position to be that close to the margin to the cut-off. We need to work overnight and make some improvement for the main quali.
I’ve got no doubt we’ll move forward in the Sprint race,” he continued. “But we need to try and get on top of our qualifying woes. It’s always difficult to fight with the cars ahead when we’re starting on the back foot.
“Everybody’s brought updates to this race; McLaren have brought a big upgrade, Aston had something [in China]. We’re kind of in the same boat as everybody else, but today it just wasn’t working for us."
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Despite his brush with the wall in his final second round flying lap, Hamilton insisted that there had been nothing violently wrong with the car in today's qualifying session.
"The car felt really good in FP1, and I was happy with the balance," he reported. "Unfortunately in Sprint qualifying the balance changed and the car regressed.
"We were close to making it through to SQ3, but we were a decent chunk of being at the front," he said. "It didn’t feel terrible, it’s just we were seven-tenths off. I feel like we extracted everything from the car and that’s just our pace.
"We just have to accept it for the moment that we’re seven-tenths off," he said, adding that the poor pace wasn't a result of more set-up experiments like China. "No more experiments," he stated. "We've just been trying to make the car work.
Hamilton set a cautious target of just getting into the top eight in the race. "The Sprint race is going to be tough," he conceded. "We’re in 12th so I don’t expect a huge amount from there to be honest."
"It’s not an easy circuit to overtake on or to follow, so we're just trying to step into the points somehow if we can."
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"The aim in the Sprint is to get both cars into the points. We know that will be a challenge from P11 and P12 but we will be fully focused on doing so," concurred Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes' Trackside Engineering Director.
"We are understandably disappointed with how today unfolded," he said. "The team worked through a full programme in FP1 and both drivers were happy with the balance of the car.
"We opted to make changes that were relatively minor ahead of Sprint Qualifying, aiming to retain that goodness in the afternoon," he said. "As we have seen on numerous occasions this year, we were unable to take the step that others were capable of.
"The spread of the field was close but we will not look to make excuses as to why both our cars were knocked out in SQ2. We need to do a better job of keeping the car in the right window and delivering the potential of earlier sessions.
"We will also be looking to use the Sprint to further our understanding of the car and to put it in a better place for Qualifying and the Grand Prix later in the weekend."
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