Kimi Raikkonen's hopes for pole position were over with two minutes remaining in qualifying, his Ferrari was not fueled long enough to get another lap time in as teammate Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton continued their fight for pole.
Speaking to the media after qualifying, the Finn cut a frustrated figure after poor strategy from his Ferrari team had let him down once again having looked so strong throughout the weekend up to that point.
"I knew how much fuel I had, but I didn’t know we didn’t have time to refuel and go out again," Raikkonen explained.
"I guess we should have stopped when we changed the tyres, we should have put more fuel and then would have managed to do more laps.
"I don’t know the reasons why, because we haven’t had the meetings yet.
"There was not much I could have done differently out there. It’s frustrating, it’s painful in the way we made our Sunday a hell of a lot more difficult.
"Here, unfortunately, often the first corner isn’t very clean because of the layout of the circuit, so the further back you start, the bigger risk that something goes wrong…
"Adding all the things, it’s definitely not great, but what can I do? We’ll try tomorrow again, hopefully learn from mistakes, and keep going."
Ferrari had looked the stronger package all weekend however once the rain started to fall, the pendulum swung back in favour of Mercedes and Hamilton was able to pull out one of his signature hot laps in the trickiest of conditions to take a record fifth pole position at Spa-Francorchamps.
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