Michael Schumacher admitted that his Mercedes hadn't been as much to his liking in qualifying today as it had been in practice, as the seven times world champion failed to make the anticipated breakthrough in Spain.
Having set top three times in practice and announced that he felt much happier in the revised Mercedes, Schumacher was tipped to be chasing the Red Bulls in qualifying.
But though he achieved the milestone of out-qualifying team-mate Nico Rosberg for the first time this year, he had to settle for sixth on the grid.
"We had a good car yesterday meaning that conditions were quite ideal for us in terms of balance and so on," said Schumacher.
"Today admittedly, the car was not as perfect.
"It is little things that can trigger that change one way or the other, and whatever happened today just triggered us to fall over the edge towards the downside a little.
"Nevertheless, I feel a lot more comfortable driving the car that I have in my hands now.
"But there is a maximum that you can get out of it and that is what we have achieved today."
Rosberg was just over 0.1s slower in eighth and frustrated that the handling problems that had impaired him in practice were still an issue.
"It's been a difficult weekend for me and we need to look into the reasons for this and understand why," he said.
"The changes that we have made with the car are obviously good and we have made a step forward but I haven't really been able to use the improvements so far.
"Considering that I have found the car difficult to drive and haven't had the best of set-ups, our performance today was acceptable but it's not where I wanted to be fighting this weekend."
Mercedes had hoped to take a big step forward in Spain thanks to its new parts, but team boss Ross Brawn admitted that actually its huge efforts had only ensured it held position rather than being pushed back.
"I am comfortable that we have made progress but other teams have also moved forward so we have further work to do," said Brawn.
"I'm not happy with the overall performance, but I am confident that if we hadn't done all of the work that we have, we would have been much further back.
"It's evident that this has happened to the teams who have not made progress since the last race.
"There are some positive signs but we need to be faster."
