'Q4' qualifying could favor big teams

Steiner and his driver Grosjean

(GMM) Another F1 team boss has warned the sport to think carefully before changing the qualifying format.

Last week, Red Bull's Christian Horner warned that adding a 'Q4' to the current system might be problematic due to a shortage of Pirelli tires.

"At first glance, we don't have enough tires for a qualifying format like that," he said.

Gunther Steiner, the boss at Haas, agrees that Liberty Media's proposal needs to be thoroughly studied.

"The idea of shorter sessions where people can look stupid is not bad, but it needs to be studied further so that we do not make the gap between the top and the rest larger instead of smaller," he is quoted by Ekstra Bladet newspaper.

Steiner suggested that because the smaller teams need to use more soft tires to progress through Q1 and Q2, expanding the format to four qualifying segments could actually favor the faster big teams.

"It could mean the three big teams get an advantage rather than it mixing everything up a bit more," he said.

Steiner said F1 must learn the lessons from 2016, when an abysmal new qualifying format was dropped after just two races.

"We just need to be sure that we are not doing it wrong, because the current qualification system is not bad. It works. If it's not broken, why try to fix it?" he said.