Michael Schumacher has criticized Formula 1's team bosses for failing to implement the drivers' requests to have qualifying at Monaco split into two groups to reduce traffic.
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 backward there were bigger gaps," he said. "Now, you have more cars in close competition in terms of lap times, but when you have 24 cars on a track which is 3.6km, it comes down to less than 200 meters 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."