? Schumacher will start from 11th on the grid in Melbourne
? HRT lose their appeal to participate in F1 season opener
Michael Schumacher suffered a miserable start to the new Formula One season when the Mercedes driver finished 11th in qualifying ahead of Sunday's Australian grand prix.
Schumacher had this week expressed confidence that Mercedes would be in a group behind Red Bull, fighting for podiums and potential wins but following a poor qualifying session Schumacher will start behind a Sauber and a Toro Rosso.
"Clearly that was not an ideal start to the season," Schumacher said. "I cannot deny that I am disappointed.
"From our testing experience, we were around the pace of Ferrari. However, this did not translate today. We faced more problems here than at the test with several issues throughout the whole weekend.
"We now have to look deeply into it to understand why it turned out to be like this, because for the moment we are not where we want to be."
"We're not exactly where we want to be, but we don't know the reasons as to why. We have various theories, but we have to analyse and understand, and then take the necessary actions."
With team-mate Nico Rosberg seventh, the team principal Ross Brawn was also a far from happy man, and at a loss to explain why both cars have been beset with irritable issues.
"Without doubt, today was quite a disappointing qualifying session for the team," said Brawn. "We expected to be more competitive. However, we haven't got the car working as well as we had hoped.
"The fundamentals are good, but we've had too many challenges this weekend to be able to get the most out of it. We are in good shape for the race in terms of tyre availability and the car looked pretty reasonable on the longer runs, so let's wait and see what happens."
The troubled HRT team will not be allowed to race in Melbourne after an appeal to participate despite not setting the required qualifying time was dismissed by the race stewards.
The Spanish-based team struggled to get their two cars on the track at all and both Vitantonio Liuzzi and Narain Karthikeyan failed to get within 107% of the best time in the first qualifying session on Saturday.
"The stewards received a request to allow (their cars to) take part in the race under exceptional circumstances," read a statement.
"The stewards, having heard the representations of the teams, decide not to allow both to take part."
"In the end it just couldn't be," the team principal Colin Kolles said. "We managed to get both cars ready in time for qualifying and proved that the car is capable of running a lot quicker than today.
"We created a miracle again but it wasn't enough. We'll be back stronger than ever in Malaysia."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/mar/26/formula-one-michael-schumacher-mercedes
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