Schumacher critical of Q1 decision

The 24 F1 drivers were unanimous in their desire to have Q1 run as two separate 10-minute sessions, rather than the normal one 20-minute, to alleviate the problem of potentially having 24 cars on the 2.25-mile circuit at once.

But the teams could not reach an agreement on the change of format, and Schumacher believes because some want to gamble on traffic playing into their hands.

"Some team bosses felt they would rather have the chaos and maybe take the profit from this than to have a reasonable, clean qualifying," Schumacher said. "So that's what it is, that's what we have to deal with, and let's see who has to suffer or not."

Although Schumacher has raced at Monaco in times when Formula 1 had more than the current 24 cars, the sessions also lasted longer so there was less chance of all the cars being out on track at once.

"In a way the field is probably a bit tighter [now] because in the past it was normal to have five or six seconds difference between the first and the last cars, and staggering backwards there were bigger gaps," he said.

"Now you have more cars in close competition in terms of laptimes, but when you have 24 cars on a track which is 3.6km, it comes down to less than 200 metres between each car if all the cars are on track. That's not much for qualifying, so it's going to be interesting for Q1."