Timo Glock admitted he would have been unable to beat Toyota teammate Jarno Trulli to pole position in Bahrain even if he hadn't made a mistake during his final run.
Glock occupied the top spot in the dying seconds of the session, but Trulli moved ahead to secure pole just moments later. It was the Italian's fourth pole of his career and only the third for Toyota.
German driver Glock admitted Trulli was unreachable.
"It was not too bad," said Glock. "We found quite a thing overnight. We struggled yesterday with the brakes quite a lot but we made good changes to the car.
"I was surprised I was quickest at the end. I was quite happy with qualifying but the wind changes, it made the car nervous, so it was quite difficult in Q3. Jarno is good at qualifying, I made one mistake and lost a little bit of time, but without that it would not have been good enough for pole."
Despite not managing to clinch his first pole, Glock was delighted with his team's first front row lock-out.
"We had problems yesterday with the car already and was far away from the test pace, so we had a lot of stuff to change," he said. "I was pretty happy with the car but in qualifying the wind changed and I struggled a bit in Q1, but I was happy in Q2 and Q3.
"It didn't work out for the pole, but we have to be happy with the first row. Thanks for the team and mechanics because they did a lot of hard work in the past weeks."