Michael: Single Q better, if a little unfair...

Williams technical director Sam Michael has admitted that he much prefers the return to one session of qualifying, but says it's unfair to use the previous race results to determine the running order.

"I think the aggregate sessions were confusing for a start, and did little for the sport," Michael said, "I think it's a fantastic change. The only thing that I would like to see in the future is to decouple it from the previous race weekend because, if you have a bad race result, it takes you too long to get you back to where you should be.

"If you've had a bad race result before, by definition it means that you've taken a disadvantage to everyone else. Then you're even further back for the next race."

Michael supports the increasingly popular idea of using Saturday morning's final free practice session as a means of producing the qualifying order.

"One of the other proposals is to take the fastest times from Saturday morning practice to determine the order, and maybe that would be a good thing as well," he mused, "I don't want to get too excited about it because I know how hard it is to change these things!

"One thing that I think McLaren has proposed is to literally take the fastest times from the P4 session. Everyone runs new tyres in second practice on Sunday morning, so just take those times, which would then mean everyone would run low fuel to make sure they've got a good slot for proper qualifying."

Michael admitted that, without the combined sessions, it is now much harder to work out what fuel loads people run in qualifying, as there is no 'low fuel' lap to use as reference.

"Although you see what people do on new tyres on Saturday morning, you don't know what fuel loads they're on," he explained, "You can have a big scatter on Saturday morning times anyway, even if they're running on the same fuel."