ABU DHABI -- Sebastian Vettel was left surprised by the gap to Mercedes in qualifying as he settled for third on the grid for 2017's finale.
Vettel had topped FP1 on Friday and stayed within 0.14s of Hamilton's quickest time in the evening session. However, 24 hours later, he was over 0.5s behind Valtteri Bottas' eventual time.
The German admitted the performance gain he expected on Saturday simply did not materialise.
"Yesterday and this morning I was quite confident that Lewis in particular was very quick, like in FP3, and [we] should get more in the direction of yesterday but it was more the other way around," Vettel said.