Kimi Raikkonen said there was nothing he could do about losing pole position to Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel in Bahrain after hitting traffic in the closing stages of Q3.
Raikkonen, who showed impressive pace during the weekend's three practice sessions, had been ahead after the initial attempts in the top-ten qualifying shootout and had the advantage of being the last man to start his final run. Despite making a small improvement, Vettel found 0.063s more on his own attempt to sneak ahead in the closing seconds.
Reflecting on where he lost time, Raikkonen said he was unable to complete a clean lap when it counted.
"Far from ideal in the last run with the traffic, but what can I do?," Raikkonen said. "I thought there was a lot we could improve, but it was a messy think, in the end. It's disappointing, because it has been pretty okay for most of the weekend, you always want more."
Despite narrowly missing out on pole Raikkonen has made a strong start to the season, but he says nothing has dramatically changed since last year, where he struggled to match Vettel across the whole season.
"Every year is different, every car is different, it's a new car and it's been pretty OK. Obviously there are things we need to improve, we can improve, but it has been going fine. Like I said it's a new car, there are certain new designs on it, it could be good or not, but there's not one particular thing that suddenly made it better for me than in the other years."