Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone stepped into the debate surrounding Formula One's qualifying crisis on the first day of the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend – by suggesting grids are decided by ballot.
The veteran commercial supremo said he also thought that a kind of "ballast" in the form of a time penalty is added to the fastest drivers to ensure that grids are made to be unpredictable.
Speaking to reporters in the paddock at the Bahrain International Circuit ahead of this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix, Ecclestone said he was disappointed with the fiasco in Australia where a newly-introduced "progressive elimination" system ended with an empty track.
"I didn't like it either," he said. "But we will have to see. When you change these things they are all prototypes – until you have actually done it, you don't know. But, you can have opinions. It wasn't my idea in the first place. So we will wait and see."
Asked directly for his personal ideas on how to change qualifying, he said: “Either a ballot, which they (the teams] don't like, which is not very sophisticated. Or leave qualifying exactly as it is and don't touch it and then add a time on.
“So, if somebody is on pole, you can take the results of the previous race, or the championship, and add two or three seconds, or whatever, to the time of the qualifying. You will find, maybe, the guy who is on pole would be 10th on the grid, or eighth, and that will go all the way down."
He added that world champion Lewis Hamilton’s recovery from sixth on the opening lap in Melbourne to finish second for Mercedes was a good example of the excitement in prospect with his ideas.
"He came through the field and that is what would happen in every race," he explained. “So all the racing would be like that -– except there would be two or three of them coming through the field."
Ecclestone spoke as the teams and drivers continued to bemoan the sport’s failure to back up their unanimous view, after qualifying in Australia, that the new system should be ditched.
Instead of switching back to the established format of recent years, however, the ruling body chose to continue with a second use of the much-maligned new qualifying.
“You know why it was put together? The idea was hoping upon hope that one or two of the hot shoes would get knocked out in Q1 or Q2," he said. “That was the whole idea – and if it is raining, maybe that will happen.”
He blamed F1’s failure to dump the controversial new system on the self-interest of certain teams, “That is the problem with a lot of things. Two teams care about themselves – not everybody."
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