In a Q3 shoot-out where the leading drivers were all denied an opportunity to improve their initial times by late yellow flags, Raikkonen came up 0.486s short of Vettel around the Red Bull Ring.

He was also beaten by the Mercedes cars of Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton, but will start right behind the Bottas/Vettel front row due to Hamilton's five-place grid penalty.

Raikkonen suggested the result was good damage limitation after he struggled through Friday practice, placing sixth in FP1 and FP2.

"Considering how difficult or bad - whichever way you want to look at it - the weekend has been, we're going to start third place tomorrow so that's at least something good," Raikkonen said.

"It could have been an awful lot worse. The car should be OK for the race. It's not been very easy so far but I think we're in a decent place to start tomorrow."

The Finn added that his situation improved dramatically between Friday and Saturday, but that he was still hampered by having "wasted a whole day".

He said: "We know what was going on [on Friday], but we don't have to talk about it.

"It got better this morning [in FP3] and then it's a matter of figuring out the balance and the set-up and obviously we were a step behind but we made the most out of it today."

Despite being satisfied with the outcome, Raikkonen described his qualifying as "messy".

Aside from the yellow flags for Haas driver Romain Grosjean in Q3, the Finn also felt he was impeded by Renault's Jolyon Palmer in Q1, which led to him switching from supersofts to ultrasofts for an unplanned second run.

Describing the Palmer incident, Raikkonen said: "It was the second lap, the lap was OK, I was in the last corner, he slowed down, I had to slow down a lot and I had to use another set of tyres, which wasn't planned. That wasn't ideal.

"The next one, Q2 was OK. Obviously we had to change the plan a bit. Then in Q3, it was not too bad.

"There were some cars in the last sector [during the first push lap], the last three corners, which didn't help. Then the second lap, there were yellow flags and I couldn't do anything."

He added: "The car was good but it was a bit messy, qualifying, but I'm happy to start third and i think the car is fine."

Additional reporting by Lawrence Barretto