Mark Webber said telemetry and KERS issues spoilt the first half of his Australian Grand Prix, but that even with a clean run he did not think Red Bull would have starred.
After qualifying on the front row alongside teammate Sebastian Vettel, Webber dropped back in the race and could only finish sixth.
"We had a lot of telemetry issues on the grid and absolutely no idea what the car was doing in terms of KERS, in terms of clutch and all sorts of stuff," he said. "So the guys were quite nervous with that and I was too. We didn't really have much of an idea in terms of getting information back to the pits.
"We lost KERS as well for the majority of the first half of the race. We had a very difficult first pi tstop. It was slow.
"We ticked a lot of boxes in a negative fashion in the first half of the race. But it can go like that."
Red Bull dominated most of the weekend, only for Kimi Raikkonen's Lotus and the Ferraris to prove faster on race day. Webber acknowledged that it was not just his technical issues that left him off the podium.
"Today, even if we'd got everything right, we were probably going to get outdone by two-stop people," he said. "The race would've been very, very difficult for us even if we'd had a smooth day.
"Fair play to Kimi and his guys. You've got to take your hat off when someone outperforms you."