Kimi Raikkonen admitted Ferrari is still struggling with its tyres after he qualified over a second off the pace in Monaco.
Ferrari looked to have entered the mix ahead of qualifying when Sebastian Vettel topped FP3 but the challenge failed to materialise when it mattered in Q3. Raikkonen could only finish sixth, which will become 11th once he serves a grid penalty for a gearbox change made after final practice.
Ferrari suffered a similar disappointment in Spain when it had to settle for the third row of the grid, something Sergio Marchionne later confirmed was down to the team struggling to get its tyres in the right working temperature range. Raikkonen suggested this was a factor again in Monaco.
Asked if he was happy with his best lap, Raikkonen said: "Of course not, but this is where we've finished, unfortunately. For sure we improved the car from practice, even from this morning we improved the car. In some places the car feels quite nice and in some places it's not so good, but I think it has more to do with getting the tyres to where we want them to be, to be able to switch them on, to make sure they are in the working range they should be on, to get the best grip out of it.
"When you get the tyres to work better the grip is better. We were so much on the edge of that working range that in some laps were better and them you expected the tyres to behave the same way, but you either lose the rears or you lose the fronts. It's not easy in this kind of place and we took a big time penalty for that if we would know how to fix that issue we would, but right know it's difficult."
Raikkonen did not want to speculate on whether Ferrari had underperformed once again.
"This is where we are right now, at least here. If we underperformed or not, I don't know. This is where we finished, so if you say that we f---ed it up or not, I don't know. This is the end result and we have to leave with it.
"The reasons? We know the reasons but if we know how to fix it? Not right now in this kind of place. But we're going to some circuits where we're more likely to have no issues. It's hard to say..."
Speaking about the gearbox penalty, the Finn said: "I don't know exactly what happened but we had to change parts or the whole gearbox and that was a very unfortunate thing, it was just at the end of FP3. It's not the first time unfortunate things happen - if I could take the penalty somewhere else I would - but this is how it is.
"It will be a tricky day tomorrow, but we'll see what we can get out of it. Hopefully it will be a really chaotic race and it comes our way. You never know."