Williams has revealed that it was a "DRS-related phenomenon" which caused both its cars to spin off in qualifying.

First Lance Stroll went off at T6 after losing control of his car and becoming embedded in the gravel, then, moments after the session had resumed - having been red-flagged as the stranded Williams was cleared - teammate Sergey Sirotkin went off at T15.

As the cameras cut to a clearly frustrated Claire Williams in the team garage, Sirotkin was at least able to get going again, but once again the Grove outfit failed to get both its cars out of Q1.

The team's technical boss, Paddy Lowe, subsequently revealed the cause of the spins.

"Unfortunately, we had a big problem in qualifying which caused both cars to spin," he said.

"We have a phenomenon which we have not seen all year, or indeed ever before," he added, "whereby the DRS activation intermittently causes a complete loss of aerodynamic floor loading which does not recover at the entry to the subsequent corner.

"In the case of both spins, the cars entered the corner with no load in the floor which had obvious consequences," he continued.

"We came to this event with a number of new bodywork items which we evaluated during FP1 and FP2. This new DRS-related phenomenon was seen only once in FP1 on one of the cars but was incorrectly diagnosed to be related to a particular configuration which we chose not to carry forward into FP2 and for qualifying and the race. We must now understand exactly what change in the cars caused this phenomenon which is entirely related to the use of DRS."

"I did the exact same thing I had been doing all weekend into corner six and the car just snapped, really aggressively," explained Stroll. "It was just odd, as it was so aggressive and I was quite shocked at how it happened so suddenly. Then, I was buried in the gravel and there was nothing that I could do."

However, teammate Sirotkin admitted that even without the phenomenon the team would have struggled to make it into Q2.

"This weekend, even with an ideal lap, we would still be six tenths off making it into Q2," said the Russian. "That is the probably the most disappointing thing for us.

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