Coulthard stunned by qualifying showing

The Red Bull Racing driver failed to make it to the second qualifying segment after traffic caused his tyres to lose temperature during his final run.

The disappointed Scot had to settle for 17th position.

"I'm shocked about that," said Coulthard. "I dropped some time in Turn 12, but the problem occurred at the start of the lap. I went out in a bunch of traffic and had Sutil behind me, so I couldn't back off, which compromised warming up the tyres.

"We believed we were fast enough to go through the first session only using prime tyres, which take longer to warm up than the options.

"Under normal conditions, if you put in a hard out lap, then using primes like that shouldn't be a problem, but unfortunately it didn't work out for us today. After this morning, I thought we were looking good for making it into Q3, we took a risk and it didn't work."

Teammate Mark Webber had a much better day, again making it into the top ten.

The Australian, seventh fastest, believes he is in a good position to score points tomorrow.

"We knew it was going to be very tight here, and that's turned out to be the case," he said. "Barcelona's a track that the team's know well, but we've put ourselves in a good position for the first stint of tomorrow's race and hopefully from there we can lay the foundations to get some good points.

"We had a problem this morning, which we recovered from well and hopefully we can keep our points run going tomorrow."