Jenson Button confessed himself at a loss to explain why his car felt so different from practice to qualifying as he missed out on the top ten shootout during qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix.

14570 - Button baffled by balance

Button was eliminated in Q2 after first struggling with oversteer then understeer and he will start the race from 11th on the grid.

"All day I've struggled with the balance," said Button. "Yesterday the car was fantastic and we were quickest on the soft tyre yesterday so I thought we'd be reasonably competitive today and at least thought we'd get into Q3 but that's not the case. I just struggled with a very different balance than I had yesterday so the car has been very different today and I don't know why that is.

"We haven't really changed that much but all of qualifying I had a lot of oversteer and that final run when we added more front end into the car I had a lot of understeer so I really don't know what's happening with the balance. But there you go, we're out in Q2 and it doesn't really help when you don't have any new option tyres left for tomorrow. The speed is in the car but I don't know what was going on today with mine."