Daniel Ricciardo and Red Bull have been struggling for pace all weekend, and the Australian has admitted that he has no idea why he and team mate Max Verstappen are at such a pace disadvantage to the other frontrunning teams.
Verstappen and Ricciardo qualified in seventh and eighth, more than four seconds off the pace set by pole sitter Lewis Hamilton, albeit in a wet session.
The Red Bull drivers were comfortably beaten by both Force India drivers and Haas’ Romain Grosjean.
Ricciardo has been off the pace all weekend, although his Dutch team mate managed to grab second in FP1 on Friday.
Ricciardo is in the first of his last few races for Red Bull after he announced he would be joining Renault for the 2019 season during the summer break.
Toiling around in the lower end of the points is not how Ricciardo would want to spend his final days with the team that has served him so well, and he is rightly confused about the pace gap.
He said: "We've been slow all weekend and, at times, nearly a second off, and not really sure why.
"That was weird and the laps I did were fine, I wasn't going off track or driving like an idiot. We just couldn't understand why. Even crossing the line, I'd see the laptime and I'm expecting to see something significantly better and I'm not, so I was a bit confused.
"We put the second set on and we went quicker but still we were even on [the] second set, we were maybe still four-tenths off Max, and the track got better. So something's been a bit off, but we haven't really figured out why yet."
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