Russell struggled for grip throughout the session and never looked likely to get into the fight for pole, and he ended up 0.394secs behind his team-mate.
He admitted to being baffled as to why he had lost performance in recent races.
“Start of the year it was just easier,” Russell said. “Every lap I did in practice, qualifying, it was P1 or worse case P2 – every single session, Q1, Q2, Q3.
“The last three races, it has just been nowhere and even Canada, it was a real fight to get a decent lap and then I just nailed it at the end of both of those sessions.
“That was pulling something special out of the hat and a bit of luck to do it at the right time, but that is just where I am at the moment.”
Norris had been fourth quickest on the first runs in the final session, but a mistake into the chicane on the harbour on his final run dropped him down.
The world champion said: “I just had a lock-up into 10. I don’t know why. When I looked at the data, I had fractionally more brake pressure but the line and bump were the same.
“I was at 99.9% and it’s hard to know that sometimes and I went to 100% and paid the price.
“I was pushing a lot. I feel like we got a lot of lap time out of it and there just wasn’t much more to come after that and that is frustrating when you see the others doing better and better laps and the gap getting bigger and you want to go with them.
“But we just didn’t have the car all weekend, we have been struggling, that’s very clear.
“Difficult weekend. I tried to go for a better lap and was 0.2secs up almost so there was more potential in it but even if I had been 0.2secs up, I would only have been ahead of Oscar. So the gap to the others was too significant.”
