Charles Leclerc said that Ferrari had taken its eye off the ball this weekend amid a number of experiments, with team principal Frederic Vasseur admitting that they hadn't executed well enough.
The team has been carrying out comparison tests on its latest package of upgrades which have proved problematic in recent races, and ultimately decided to roll back to an older specification used in Barcelona.
"We decided to move to the old spec for today as there was more bouncing with the new one and with the high speed corners we have at Silverstone, the trade-off of fitting the new parts wasn’t positive enough," said Vasseur.
"We're trying to just assess the situation we are in at the moment and try to understand which are the directions in which we need to push into," Leclerc explained in the paddock at Silverstone.
"Yesterday, by splitting the cars [to run pre- and post-Barcelona packages], we understood a good amount to use for the future," he said. “We came to the conclusion that it was the right choice to come back [to the old configuration] for this weekend, mostly because of bouncing.
"We’ll take the right decision for the future very soon," he added. "However that means that maybe you don’t optimise your whole weekend as you are focused on just trying to learn."
Leclerc hasn't been higher than fifth in any practice session to far, but went into qualifying with solid expectations of getting through to the final round of qualifying and starting in the top ten.
Instead he missed the cut as track conditions improved and other cars found more speed before the chequered flag, leaving him starting from P11 tomorrow.
"The track evolved considerably," explained Vasseur. "Charles made a mistake in turn 13 that meant he didn’t make it to Q3. I think today we didn’t execute qualifying well enough."
"We are just really slow," Leclerc admitted. "We lost Q3 by a tenth and it was the first time I was driving with this configuration on the dry after FP3 in the wet.
"When you are speaking about a tenth to go to Q3, it’s all about small details, so at the moment we are just struggling," he acknowledged. “Mercedes is in front, McLaren is in front, Red Bull is in front and we're the ones that have been struggling.
"For sure we’ve lost some performance since Monaco and we are looking into it, that’s why we're doing all these tests. "I hope we can bounce back as soon as possible," he said. “Last year we did that in Zandvoort, it was a turning point of our season.
“So we shouldn’t over-panic," he insisted. "But it's true that this difficult time has been there for longer than last year, so we’ve really got to [sort it out]."
Leclerc's team mate Carlos Sainz did make it through to the final top ten pole shoot-out round but was also disappointed by his final grid position of seventh, blaming track congestion on his final run.
"We didn’t maximise the Q3 result, given the out-lap issues we had with Fernando [Alonso] and Oscar [Piastri]," he said. "All three of us were battling to get to the flag. Obviously you’re never going to prep your tyres and everything well.
"With hindsight, I think we could have left the garage a bit earlier for the last run, as the out-lap was messy, fighting for position with other cars and the tyres were not in the right window before the last push.
"I gave it everything out there but we knew Silverstone was going to be a tough track for us," the Spaniard said. "Coming to the king of high-speed like Silverstone, we’re always going to struggle.
“We saw the high-speed of Barcelona, and Austria we were clearly a step behind all of our competitors," he said. "But the points are given out tomorrow [and] we need to get the points, so I look forward to the race, which could be interesting with the weather."
"We need to nail our strategy and execute the race perfectly if we want to bring home a decent points haul," added Vasseur. "Given our grid positions, if it rains the race might be more chaotic and that could suit us better."
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