Lawson qualified 14th for today’s race but will start one place higher after Carlos Sainz was found to have impeded Lewis Hamilton.
It marked the New Zealander’s best qualifying result of the season, but he was left dissatisfied and believing he could have achieved more.
“I felt really good in the car,” he said after Qualifying.
“It’s a shame that, for whatever reason, it sort of got away from us at the end of Quali 2.
“The potential of the car has been very, very good this weekend and we should really be well in Q3.”
While Lawson wasn’t able to progress, teammate Isack Hadjar did make it through to the final segment of the three-part qualifying hour with the French rookie set to start the race from seventh place.
Changing conditions and track evolution during Qualifying caught Lawson out as he was unable to adapt the car.
“We had good pace and a pretty good balance and we just somewhere along the way… I think with the wind change today, we struggled more,” he reasoned.
“Obviously Isack found a way to make it work and had a great session.
“For us, I think it was alright in Q1 and then, just through Q2, we got to a point where we couldn’t really chase it enough and the balance got away from us.”
Lawson’s best of 1:27.906s proved less than two-tenths off the time needed to progress through to Qualifying 3, and little more than three-tenths off what Hadjar secured seventh place with.
While the 23-year-old may be disappointed with the result, it’s a promising foundation given it’s his first weekend aboard the VCARB02.
“Comfort-wise, I felt fine,” he said of his second day in the car.
“I felt really good, even stronger than yesterday in terms of, I guess, comfort in the car – obviously, it’s another day in it.
“We just struggled mainly with Sector 1 balance and where we had the car.
“It felt like a really good lap, I just couldn’t get much more out of it.”
Today’s Japanese Grand Prix begins at 15:00 AEST.
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