Grosjean blames Mercedes for Q2 exit

Grosjean comfortably made it out of Q1 with the eighth-best lap of the session, but struggled in Q2, ending up with a slower laptime and placing only 15th.

With teammate Esteban Gutierrez up in 12th, Grosjean believes he was in with a chance of making Q3 and blames Mercedes for baulking him during his runs.

"Q1 went well, but then twice in Q2 we had a lot of traffic on the outlap," Grosjean said.

"We ended up twice behind a Mercedes, they do whatever they want, but they slow down massively and the tyres went already - and then you're f**ked.

"No grip [on the tyres] initially, very difficult to warm-up and that's what cost us. I think top 10 today was clearly possible as we showed in Q1, but we didn't get any proper laps in Q2."

Despite the outcome of his qualifying, Grosjean was pleased with the Haas VF-16's progress in Monaco.

"I think we made some good progress from the beginning of the weekend, much more happy with the car - very frustrated after qualy cause I was really thinking we could make it to Q3," he said.

"But you just need... the window of the tyres is so small, each car is different - we needed a quick out lap and everyone in front was slow, so that was it."

Gutierrez seeks consistency

Grosjean's teammate Gutierrez, two tenths away from a Q3 spot, said he was happy with his performance, but admitted to similar struggles with the tyres.

"[The Q2 lap] was good," Gutierrez said. "But I think we can still improve a little bit the consistency - I was struggling a bit with tyre preparation and trying to find the sweet spot.

"We know the tyres are very sensitive to that and, as a team, we need to gain a lot of experience and understand what the best way is to get a more consistent car."

Additional reporting by Oleg Karpov