For the second successive weekend, Sergio Perez has paid the price for failing to qualify better.

In Monaco he was left with an uphill struggle after crashing out in Q1, and while he only just failed to make it out of Q2 in Spain it meant a podium finish was never realistically likely.

Starting on fresh mediums, the Mexican had made his way up to fourth by the time he made his first stop on Lap 27, dropping him back to ninth.

By the time of his second stop he was up to third, rejoining in fifth he was soon able to overhaul Carlos Sainz but ended the day fourth, around 3.5s behind podium-finisher George Russell, who had started the race 12th, a place behind the Mexican.

"I am disappointed with today," Perez admitted at race end, "we have ultimately paid the price for a bad qualifying.

"We had a good strategy," he added, "but looking at where we started from, there was only so much that we could do."

Referring to his late attempt to overhaul Russell, he said: "It did feel a bit far and I wasn't fighting with George, it was more with Carlos. Pretty early on I could see that George was quite strong and unfortunately, we finished behind George."

The defining moment for Russell came at the opening corner, when in his efforts to avoid a battling Oscar Piastri and Nico Hulkenberg he took to the escape road, making up several places, including leapfrogging Perez. The stewards noted the incident but felt the Briton had done nothing illegal.

"P3 was possible," said Perez, "but if we wanted more points then I would have had to take more risks on lap 1 and potentially compromise my race.

"George went really deep on that first lap, gaining a lot of positions but we took it easier to ensure we had more of a clean start. Then we got stuck behind the Aston Martin and Fernando was quite hard to pass.

"It meant I couldn't progress through the field as quickly as we would have liked."

"Checo lost out in the early laps," said Christian Horner. "He didn't have a great start, while George managed to get away with running off track, not getting a penalty from that. I think that was the difference at the end of the day.

"It was a good recovery from Checo," he continued, "especially the second part of the race and I think that will give him a lot more confidence.

"Checo's race was getting stronger and stronger. That last stint in particular he was coming back very strong, but there were just not enough laps to fight for that podium."

Check out our Sunday gallery from Barcelona here.