Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack has suggested that tyre pressures were too high during qualifying, which is why both Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll were dumped out in the first phase.
The British side had looked relatively strong all weekend, and Vettel even managed P3 in the third and final practice session on Saturday morning, but in similar conditions during qualifying, their pace was nowhere.
Vettel said that the car felt “so different” on the radio after he was eliminated and, after the red mist had dissipated, he was eager to find out exactly why that was.
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“I’ve calmed down now but what’s the point of being pissed off now?” he said in the media pen.
“It’s one of those days where in a wet session, with just a car like you want it to be, you can make a difference.
“And I don’t know what went wrong so we missed that opportunity.
“First of all, we need to try and understand what happened, whether there’s actual damage or whether we did something wrong.
“It’s disappointing because I think we could have had a really good result in these conditions, even better than in the dry.
“So I don’t know, we need to have a look, it’s too early to say something.
“But given how bad the car felt, it’s not a surprise that we were so slow, but it’s obviously bitter.”
Krack divulged that the team had struggled to get the tyres into an optimal window in terms of pressure on Saturday morning and, given how quickly the track dried during Q1, the highly inflated tyres struggled to find enough purchase to deliver lap time.
“We are looking into it,” explained the German
“We had no grip, both drivers went out, we had not enough grip.
“Then we came in the box, made an adjustment, took another set of tyres, and we had a similar problem.
“So, we think it’s tyre pressure related.
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“We ran quite a lot this morning and the pressures didn’t come up very well this morning, so we had to take a lot of laps to build pressures.
“And we thought that conditions were quite similar, but we had 20 cars on the track in the afternoon, which probably dried the track, or made the track faster, much, much quicker than we were anticipating.
Lance Stroll qualified 18th behind his team-mate, which became 17th when Charles Leclerc’s penalty was applied.
The Canadian did brilliantly to recover into the points in 10th, but the car was still a handful on Sunday.
“It was a good strategy and happy to score points,” said Stroll in the media pen.
“I don’t think we were actually too quick today, and the car didn’t feel great so, we had a good strategy and did a good job of defending the cars behind but actually, it was a tough race and I don’t think we were very quick.
“But, always good to score a point.”
Vettel also gained ground during the race, but ended P12 in a frustrating weekend for the four-time champion.