Sebastian Vettel said a slide in Turn 2 proved costly in his attempt to take pole position at the Canadian Grand Prix, but admitted Lewis Hamilton was ultimately the faster driver on Saturday afternoon.
Vettel qualified 0.330s off Hamilton after the Mercedes driver smashed the Montreal track record by more than 0.7s. The Ferrari had looked the quicker car during final practice, but in qualifying Hamilton improved by over a second to take pole.
"First of all, congrats to him, he was the better man today," Vettel said. "I'm not entirely happy, we had a little bit of a different running in qualifying which I think was fine. It just got better and better, and for the last run I thought we can step it up and we should be able to find a little bit of time, but I lost the car a bit on Turn 2 and then I lost a bit the back.
"So already I was losing 0.2s out of the second corner, and then I knew I had to catch up, which I did, until the end of the lap but yeah not enough for pole. That's how it is.
"Nevertheless I think the car was pretty good, I was very happy this morning and then in the afternoon, and it should be good in the race. Looking forward for tomorrow."
Vettel expects Ferrari and Mercedes to be closely matched on race pace, which he suspects will make it difficult to overtake.
"Well I expect a close race. I think it's been close every race so far, may be not in Monaco, but everywhere we went it was close.
"It's not so easy to overtake, if you're that close, no matter where you go, but we'll see. It could be a long race tomorrow, so I'm looking forward for tomorrow."