09/05/2005
NEWS STORY
FIA President, Max Mosley, has confirmed that Bernie Ecclestone was the primary force behind the (widely despised) new qualifying format, which he agrees is a mistake.
Ecclestone got the idea for the new format following the change to the Grand Prix weekend schedule in Japan 2004, when the threat of a typhoon caused all Saturday activity to be cancelled. As a result, two back-to-back sessions were held on the Sunday morning, ahead of the race, which generally went down well with fans, teams and drivers.
However, it was a one-off, it was never going to work on a long-term basis.
Talking at the weekend, Mosley admitted that he too dislikes the format, but that there is unlikely to be a change in the near future.
"Qualifying is, in my view, a mistake," he said. "It was proposed by, with all fairness to him, our commercial rights holder, Bernie Ecclestone, it was his idea, and the idea was that this would be good for the television on Sunday morning, and on that basis it was let through.
"I think everybody now realises that that's a mistake but occasionally mistakes are made," he added. "The difficultly now is to get it changed back, we would need to get all the teams to agree and we all know how difficult that can be.