Things that led to Hamilton's horrendous day at Baku following his pace-setting performance on Friday

On the back of a highly encouraging practice day at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Ferrari's Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton endured an incredibly tough day at Baku, and will start from the midfield on Sunday.

Ferrari looked quick on the opening day at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and seemed to have carried over that form to qualifying day, with both Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc having displayed a competitive performance in the third and final practice.

The British and the Monegasque driver posted impressive lap times in Q1, but their session started to go wrong in Q2. On their initial runs Leclerc went wide, wrecking his lap but also his team mate’s as Hamilton was forced to abort thanks to the resultant yellow flags.

Coming back out as the clock ticked down, Leclerc did enough to make Q3 on Pirelli's medium tyres. However, Hamilton was left out on his worn soft tyres, and the seven-time world champion was unable to make it out of Q2.

All eyes were set on Leclerc, but the Monegasque, who always goes well at Baku, crashed just as the rain started to fall in Q3, bringing out the red flags and failing to set a lap time.

The disappointing result leaves Leclerc and Hamilton to start from a disappointing P10 and P12, respectively which is a far cry from what the Scuderia hoped for after the highs of yesterday.

Commenting on his challenging qualifying session, Hamilton was left to rue the tyre choice in Q2: "I’m disappointed not to have been able to convert our strong start to the weekend into a good qualifying result. We will be looking at the session as a team so we can take the learnings from it. We know it will be a challenge tomorrow, but the car has felt good all weekend and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do in the race.

"And ultimately, our pace had been good, we'd been progressing, I was feeling really on it, didn't make any mistakes, you didn't see me go down any exit roads, it was just that we didn't have the right tyre on at the end – and it's tough.

"Everyone ahead of me basically had the medium tyre on, but I lost a medium tyre in FP2 and due to our run plan, and that put me on the back foot."

Pushed on to reveal why he did not switch to the yellow-banded tyres, Hamilton added: "I wanted to. But they said that the warm-up was too long or something like that, so then we ran out of time and then ran out of fuel.

"So not great, but we'll take it internal. As I said, there's been lots of positives from this weekend, I've really felt on it. I honestly thought I was going to be shooting for a pole today and so it's kind of a bit of a shock, but I'll take it on a chin and keep trying."