Nico Rosberg is convinced he can still beat Lewis Hamilton at the Malaysian Grand Prix despite being comfortably beaten to pole at Sepang.
Rosberg appeared to struggle on Saturday while Hamilton excelled; at one point in Q3 he was fifth and nearly a full second behind his Mercedes teammate. He managed to get himself back on the front row with his final run in the session, but still over 0.4s behind Hamilton.
The German moved into the lead of the championship with a third straight win in Singapore, which followed a win in Monza, where he beat Hamilton off the line. Rosberg is optimistic he can claim a fourth victory in a row on Saturday.
When asked if he had been going for pole on his final lap or looking just to recover from fifth, he replied: "Of course I'm going for pole, what else would I be doing out there? But Lewis' lap was very quick so it was always going to be difficult. I would have come close but unfortunately I had a mistake in the last corner.
"Something just wasn't going right there in that last corner, I couldn't get the settings right, always got an over steer moment there but anyways, got to live with that now. As we know from this year, second place does not mean that victory is not possible tomorrow, we've seen that so many times, so I'm still very optimistic for tomorrow."
Rosberg thinks there will be plenty of variation on tyre strategy during the grand prix if he needs to do something different on strategy.
"It's only between the medium and the hard really, so yes it's possible that we could see some variation, depends maybe also on the temperature and everything, but I don't think it's going to be too exciting strategy-wise, because the tyres are pretty similar so I don't think it's going to have such a deciding factor."