Ecclestone hints at ballots

Manama : Bernie Ecclestone stepped into the debate surrounding Formula One’s qualifying crisis yesterday -– 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.