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Williams urges clarity on qualifying after Bahrain

Claire Williams wants uncertainty over the qualifying format to reach a clear and considered resolution after the Bahrain Grand Prix.

A new elimination-style qualifying was introduced at the first race of the season in Australia and was widely criticised as pole position was decided long before the end of the session. While the team bosses originally planned to revert back to the old format for this weekend's race, a unanimous decision could not be reached and now the new format will remain in place.

Williams - deputy team principal of the Williams team - says any further negative reaction in this afternoon's session should not lead to a knee-jerk response

"In qualifying, the revised form in Australia came out and we said we would give it a go and if it didn’t work we would revert and come back to the drawing board," Williams said. "And obviously that meeting happened on Sunday and everybody agreed that we would revert back to the 2015 format until we could all come together and decide and actually try and come up with a well considered revised process for qualifying.

"Unfortunately that obviously has happened in the interim, we’ve had a new vote among strategy group members which then went to the commission. Now we have this hybrid system which we’re running.

"Personally, from a Williams perspective, we would have rather to have gone back to the 2015 format as a holding pattern, to give us time to meet again as a group and to actually have time to go through what a new system could look like rather than kind of go to a hybrid system which might not work again.

"I think we have to wait anyway and see whether that will work or not and then take the time to actually think about it. I think otherwise our fans are just going to look at our sport and go ‘what are they doing?’ You can’t do this in the second race of a championship so it’s really important to us that we get this resolved as quickly as possible but to do it in a well-thought through manner."

REPORT: Rosberg heads Hamilton and Button in FP2

AS IT HAPPENED: Bahrain Grand Prix FP2

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.