Michael Schumacher was left disappointed by the performance of his Mercedes during qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix.
The seven-time champion failedmissed the cut for the final qualifying session by 0.087 seconds and will start Sunday's race from 11th, behind the likes of Sebastian Buemi in the Toro Rosso and Kamui Kobayashi in the Sauber.
"Clearly that was not an ideal start to the season, and I cannot deny that I am disappointed," he said. "It's not about that KERS only worked intermittently or that I could probably have made it to Q3, but it is because our performance did not turn out as we expected. From our testing experience, we were around the pace of Ferrari, however this did not translate today."
After a string final test at Barcelona where the car ran reliably for four straight days, Schumacher was particularly concerned by the number of problems with the car this weekend.
"We faced more problems here than at the test with several issues throughout the whole weekend. We now have to look deeply into it to understand why it turned out to be like this, because for the moment we are not where we wanted to be."
Ross Brawn did not deny that the car has not been up to scratch so far this weekend.
"Without doubt, today was quite a disappointing qualifying session for the team," he said. "We expected to be more competitive however we haven't got the car working as well as we had hoped today. The fundamentals are good but we've had rather too many challenges this weekend to be able to get the most out of it. We are in good shape for the race tomorrow in terms of tyre availability and the car looked pretty reasonable on the longer runs so let's wait and see what happens."
Nico Rosberg, who qualified the Mercedes seventh, echoed the team's complaints, but admitted to making a mistake.
"I'm disappointed as when I went to bed last night, I was hopeful of a good qualifying performance," he said. "In the morning, a few things didn't work on my car, but the team did a good job and almost all of the systems were working for qualifying, so we need to find out what happened. I did make a small mistake in Q3 which possibly cost me a place but it hasn't quite come together for us this weekend. One good thing is that I will start on the clean side of the grid, and we will do our best to score some good points tomorrow."
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