Sebastian Vettel said he was knocked out of the first round of qualifying for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix after Ferrari simply made the wrong call over whether his initial Q1 time would be enough to make Q2.
Vettel will start 16th because of the mistake but is in no doubt that he had the pace to progress further in qualifying. He had set a time on soft tyres, which turned out not to be good enough to make Q2, and then aborted a quicker lap on super-soft tyres that would almost certainly would have seen him make the cut.
"Nothing dramatic happened, there was nothing wrong with the car, but of course the plan was not to go out straight away in Q1," he said. "We thought the lap time we had done with the softs was enough but, in the end, it turned out it wasn't. We misjudged the situation and then, unfortunately, we went out.
"You can spend a lot of time talking about what went wrong, but in the end I think we know, so we have to move forward. In the end it doesn't matter who made the call to abort the lap, as a team we didn't make the right call today and the consequence was what you can see."
In previous years some drivers have struggled to overtake in Abu Dhabi, but Vettel was able to move from a pit lane start to third in the race in 2012 driving a Red Bull. He believes it will be possible to make progress, but admits it will be harder as he ventures up the order.
"It depends who you want to overtake, as you get further up it naturally becomes more difficult. But there are a lot of cars that we are quite a bit quicker than, so hopefully we can clear them. It's a long race, so hopefully we can do something with strategy etc. We have to be awake, be ready and I think you can overtake even if sometimes it's not easy. It's not impossible."