Not for the first time this year, Kimi Raikkonen appeared to be showing his illustrious Ferrari teammate a clean pair of heels.

Then, in Q3, as Sebastian Vettel, seemingly from out of nowhere, produced a 1:31.095, the Iceman, who was quicker in the first two sectors, appeared to lose time in the final sector, finally stopping the clock at 1:31.182, leaving him starting from second on the grid for the third successive race.

Laconic at the best of times, in the aftermath of a session that might prove to be the turning point of the season, the popular Finn was almost speechless.

"Nothing really happened," he said, when asked how he had lost out in the final sector. "I lost some time but it's not like I made some big mistake.

"It's not exactly what I wanted," he admitted. "We'll go again tomorrow and see what we can do. We'll try to improve. It's going to be a long race, we try to stay out of any issues and then see how it goes."

Like his teammate, and the Mercedes pair, the Finn will start the race on the more durable, but slower, yellow-banded soft tyres.

The tyre choice was quite an easy decision in our minds, we could only find out in qualifying if it was going to be fast enough to do Q2 with those tyres, but I think it was quite a straightforward decision We'll see how it pans out tomorrow, It's unknown tomorrow but we'll see how it goes.''

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