Formula 1 world championship leader Oscar Piastri blamed a pure lack of execution on his part for a disappointing fourth on the Miami Grand Prix grid.
The McLaren driver was well in contention in the fight for pole position after the first runs in Q3, but failed to make an improvement on his final effort as Max Verstappen took the top spot ahead of Lando Norris.
Having lost out on the win in the earlier sprint race because of misfortune with a badly timed safety car, Piastri said the fault for the qualifying result lay firmly at his door.
"This afternoon was nothing to do with luck," he said. "It was just not the level of execution I needed to have in Q3.
"It's never a great qualifying session when your best lap is the first lap of Q2. There was quite a bit left on the table just through a few mistakes on both laps in Q3, which is a shame."
While tyre management over a qualifying lap to avoid overheating the rubber meant drivers were having to carefully manage their pace in the first sector, Piastri insisted this was not a factor in where it went wrong for him.
"In both Q3 laps I struggled in Turn 1," he said. "I think I lost pretty much two tenths in Turn 1 and then my first lap in Q3.
"I kind of gained it back a bit in the rest of sector one, but then fell away in the middle.
"On the last one, I eventually recovered some of it at the end, but it wasn't enough. So it was nothing to do with preparation. It was just execution of the driving unfortunately."
McLaren's qualifying weakness
While McLaren has won all but one grand prix so far this season, and is widely acknowledged to have the best car, there has been a long-running theme of it not being at its best in qualifying.
And having lost out again on a Saturday to Red Bull driver Verstappen, who also took pole position in Japan and Saudi Arabia, Piastri said it had highlighted that his team still has to find gains in unlocking more pace in qualifying.
"There are definitely still some things with our car that we want to try to address and driving it right on the limit is one of them," he said.
"I think this weekend it has had enough pace to be on pole, it's just that I've not done as good a job as I should've, unfortunately.
"It's always been tight, the gap's always been close and potentially our advantage has been a little bit more on Sundays.
"But our picture of where we stand has always been that if we make mistakes, we're going to be beaten. And that's been true here."Despite the clear edge that McLaren has had with tyre management in races, Piastri is a little unsure if he will be able to exploit it much on Sunday.
"It's hard to say, honestly," he said. "The tyres have behaved a bit better than most people expected, I would say, compared to last year.
"If it's hot, that might help us out a little bit. But qualifying is still going to make a massive difference for today, so it's not going to be easy to make progress. But I'm confident in the car we've got."
