Ross Brawn admits that Saturday in Italy was a tough day for Mercedes, as the team failed to get pole for the first time in three months.
Nico Rosberg didn’t quite get his set-up right after missing most of FP3, and had to settle for sixth.
Meanwhile Lewis Hamilton damaged his floor at the Ascari chicane in Q2, which contributed to his later trip over the gravel at Parabolica.
That meant he had everything to do on his final run, and the damage – plus getting caught behind Adrian Sutil – contributed to him getting stuck in 12th place.
“It definitely wasn’t a great day for all of us today,” said Brawn. “We had a reliability issue with Nico in the morning which meant he lost most of the session, and for me Monza is always about confidence for a driver, getting a balance fine tuned and being confident in the car and building up.
“It’s very low downforce, high speed braking, so I think losing that amount of time was always going to be difficult. It meant as a consequence we didn’t really have a great balance on Nico’s car during qualifying.
“Lewis was looking OK, and unfortunately caught a kerb and damaged the car underneath and broke the floor, and we didn’t realise the consequence of that until a bit later in the session. It was irreparable, so that was unfortunate as well.
“It just wasn’t our day, today. Some of it is the nature of motor racing, some of it like the reliability problem with Nico we have to try and do a better job.”
Adam Cooper F1 