Why it's time to ditch F1 qualifying

Changing for the sake of change is usually to be avoided. But it's true that if you can identify problems and rectify them, usually you will go forward, and Formula 1 has been pretty much the same for as long as I have been involved in it.

You have practice, then qualifying, and if all goes to plan the fastest driver ends up at the front. Then in the race, to nobody's great surprise, when you put the quickest car and driver combination at the front, they rush off into the lead and win.

There was a time when reliability was a major factor, and there was always the risk that at any moment a driver in the lead would pull over with a plume of smoke coming out of the car. But even with these highly complex engines, reliability has never been better. This means a fluke result or two during the season is a distant memory. So much so that since the start of 2016 we've had only five podium finishes for teams outside the privileged circle of Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.

Normally the real battles are in the mid-pack, so this is where the real interest is to be found. But at the front, unless there is some divine intervention, it's very often straightforward.

Looking at the so-called 'Class B' championship, there have been eight different winners from five different teams this year and there's a cracking battle for the title going on between Nico Hulkenberg, Sergio Perez, Esteban Ocon, Carlos Sainz Jr and Kevin Magnussen, who would be covered by just 16 points were the leading three teams taken out of the equation. Unfortunately it's not like that up front.

Most of the good races or unexpected results have been caused by either the virtual safety car or the real safety car being involved. That always throws a curveball in the direction of the teams as they decide how to adjust their strategy. We also had rain that turned things around in Germany and in qualifying in Hungary. Max Verstappen's drive from 19th to fifth at Sochi shows you can still get a result from a mixed-up grid. Yes, he didn't win, but if he had it would have shown it was too easy.

Now there is talk of modifying qualifying. But what's being proposed is a bit like putting a grain of sugar in a very bitter coffee; it won't change the overall need for the teams to do the best they can to get the best result on race day.

Formula 1's now not-so-new owner, Liberty Media, wants to increase the glitz and improve the racing spectacle. At the same time it also wants to get more fan involvement. So while we're talking about modifying the race weekend format, how about something like this, which has practice as normal and then does away with qualifying in favour of a Saturday race?

On Friday at 6pm, all the drivers go to a designated zone at the circuit. To make things easy for them and to allow the fans to get closer, this could be on the pit straight in front of the garages and the main grandstand.

As is done in downhill skiing, each driver - in reverse championship order - picks a small Pirelli tyre from a Pirelli tyre-shaped tombola. On that is a grid position number for the Saturday race. If you don't turn up, you automatically take last place.

A qualifying race will bring more cars together at the same time. That will always be more of a spectacle

The fans have the opportunity to vote overnight and the driver with the most votes moves up the grid three places, the driver with the second highest number of votes goes up two places and the one with the third level of votes moves up one place.

This is to identify the driver the fans support most, and it gives the drivers an incentive to put a little more into their fan-appreciation efforts.

The race lasts 50 minutes, and the chequered flag is shown to the leader when they complete the first lap after hitting that time. No pitstops are mandatory and you have one set of each of the three compounds available for that circuit available for the race. The choice of which tyre to start on is yours.

The finishing position of this race is the grid position for the grand prix itself, and the cars that are classified finishers go into parc ferme. The others can be repaired and have to start the grand prix in the reverse of the order they stopped running, so the last one to retire is the first behind the cars that actually finished.

Doing this doesn't really change the weekend schedule and allows the support races more or less the same track time. It means the Saturday spectators and viewers will have a race to enjoy and the grid will not just be determined by the best driver being in the best car.

It also means that the teams will have to take into account the cars running in traffic, so aerodynamically they will have to make more compromises to allow that to happen.

One downside of this suggested format is that you lose the spectacle of qualifying. But I'm not convinced the spectators really see the pure speed that qualifying brings, since each driver does slow laps either side of every fast one and they are rarely running close to one another on those fast laps.

In fact, the present arrangement is functionally not that far away from single-car qualifying. A qualifying race would bring more cars together at the same time and that will always be more of a spectacle.

Over the years, qualifying has been the part of the grand prix weekend that has changed the most. There has been Friday and Saturday qualifying, one-car qualifying, one car with race-start fuel load, the average of fuel and no fuel - the list could go on and on, and that's because it has never brought good racing to the show.

What we have now is probably the best we've had, but it still doesn't contribute to a good show on the Sunday. If a change is going to be made, then that is the focus area.

The current proposal to have four sessions instead of three is just a tiny change to what we currently have, but the reason is to make it a little bit more of a lottery. But if a change is required then it needs to be much bigger than this.

McLaren sporting director Gil de Ferran recently warned of devaluing a grand prix win by tinkering with qualifying.

But winning from pole because you are in the best team with the fastest car just shows you have the speed. But winning, or at least getting on the podium from further down the grid, means you are a more complete driver. I doubt there is a driver out there that doesn't remember with satisfaction a race where, for whatever reason, they have come through from a low grid position to bag a result.

With the current qualifying system, if the weekend goes as expected the race winner is actually known on Saturday after qualifying. Without divine intervention, why should a slower car beat a faster one just because it's Sunday?

Isn't it just a bit artificial that the biggest teams with the biggest budgets and the best people dominate and leave very little hope for the underdog?

There's also the question of luck - for example if you draw P1 and your title rival P20. Well, I'm pretty sure with 21 races this would even out over the season. There is a risk this could make a title decider one-sided, but any championship is about points accumulated over the whole season.

There is also another potential benefit of mixing things up as I've suggested. Today, the teams design the fastest car they can within a set of regulations and know that if they do the best job, they start at the front in clear air. The FIA has tried and failed on many occasions to write regulations that will make the cars better in traffic - the mandatory flat centre section of the front wing is an example, but the percentage improvement it has led to is miniscule.

A weekend schedule with a qualifying race will put the onus on the teams to make cars less critical in dirty air.

The Japanese Grand Prix itself was actually pretty good, but unfortunately just not at the front. Mercedes continued its domination with another one-two, and I'm sure there was a lot in hand if needed.

Further down the field, because of a throttle actuator problem for Daniel Ricciardo in Q2, and Sebastian Vettel (here's that word again) making a 'mistake' while trying to recover from another 'mistake' in qualifying, we had a couple of fast cars coming up through the field.

What I have suggested above would mean this sort of thing would be happening every weekend. Would it be artificial? I suppose to a certain extent it would be, but isn't it just a bit artificial that the biggest teams with the biggest budgets and the best people, including the best drivers, dominate and leave very little hope for the underdog?

Playing into the Mercedes domination is Ferrari's chaos. At the moment if there is a decision to make, Ferrari and Vettel will make the wrong one. They have all the tools available to them, but still they keep putting themselves in an impossible situation.

Vettel's overtaking attempt on Verstappen was, to say the least, ambitious. He paid the price for that and with a deficit of 67 points he can wave goodbye to the championship.

If sitting at the end of the pitlane for quite a while waiting for the green light to start Q3 on intermediate tyres when the others were all on slicks was not bad enough, after pitting for slicks at the end of the out-lap both Ferrari drivers then went out and made 'mistakes' on their only dry laps. There's that word again.

Vettel said he was not blaming anyone for this decision. I'm not saying that he should blame anyone, it's just that collectively the team keeps on getting things wrong.

These decisions are really very simple. With the conditions as they were at the beginning of Q3, if you can get a lap on slicks it will be quicker than a lap on inters. So any smart gamble should be to use slicks if at all possible. If you don't, then there is still time to recover to a certain degree by fitting the inters or, if necessary, wets.

The words 'grande casino' has come back into the Ferrari vocabulary. For Maurizio Arrivabene to say it is a young team, well that's just downright ridiculous.

For a start, between them Raikkonen and Vettel have done 502 grands prix. So if the rest of the team has no gut feel about a situation like this then they should intervene and steer them in the right direction.

But with the number of mistakes Vettel has been making lately, perhaps it would be better to leave these decisions up to Raikkonen...