Jenson Button admitted he was surprised to be lining up eighth on the grid for the Bahrain Grand Prix after revealing that his car "felt wrong" during Q3.
The World Champion just scraped through Q2 into the top 10 shoot-out, but then posted a time of 1m55.672sec –1.5sec off pole and 0.4sec slower than McLaren teammate Lewis Hamilton – on his final run.
"It was getting better every run I did and I was getting more comfortable with the car," Button told the BBC. "I really struggled with the fronts locking this afternoon – very different to this morning.
"Through qualifying, it was getting better and better and then in the last run something was a bit wrong. Something felt wrong, so we are going to have a look at the car now and see what that is. I'm surprised I was eighth actually because it was struggling around the last lap."
Button also added that he was surprised by the sheer pace of the Vettel's Red Bull and the Ferraris that occupy the three spots in front of Hamilton on the grid.
"Lewis is up in fourth which is not such a bad position, but when you look at the difference in lap time to P1 it's massive – over one second – so it's a big surprise. I think Red Bull are very, very fast and even the Ferraris couldn't stay with them in qualifying.
"My first run in Q2, I was in traffic and the second one was a bit better. It was getting better and better every lap so I was reasonably happy but, yeah, at the end it wasn't so good and something just feels a little bit wrong so we need to look at that."