World champions Ferrari and other top Formula One teams might deliberately try to qualify slowest in Friday's opening qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix, McLaren driver David Coulthard said today.
The Scot speculated that big teams could form alliances with smaller outfits and ask for their help during a race.
Under the new rules for the new Formula One season, teams will have their first qualifying run on Fridays.
For the decisive qualifying session on Saturdays they will go out in reverse order - Friday's slowest first and fastest last.
Coulthard said it might be in a driver's best interests not to clock a quick time on Friday so he could go out early the following day.
"With forecasting the way it is nowadays, if you were to find out that they were expecting rain on Saturday and they were expecting rain towards the end of the (qualifying) session then you might not want to qualify quickest on Friday," Coulthard said.
"You might want to actually qualify slowest so you can go first on Saturday and get the opportunity to have the dry track.
"I think it's still going to be tactical. I think what we're losing is the opportunity to see grand prix cars absolutely running at their maximum in qualifying.
"The reality is that, somewhere like Monaco, it would be an advantage to be able to qualify last on Saturday - so therefore to be quickest on Friday - because the track gets quicker as it gets more and more (tyre) rubber."
"In some ways it's taken away that kudos that we used to get for qualifying," said Coulthard.
He also predicted slower cars which won higher grid positions could ruin the race for the pacesetting teams - if they purposefully qualified on low fuel for less weight and therefore quicker times.
"They can screw your race up because while you're being held up behind them your main competitors are going to be running at their track pace."
Coulthard also forecast the possibility of a top team and a backmarker outfit, which had links, helping each other during a race.
"You could imagine a scenario ... where if teams became aligned with each other (and) a small team was to qualify in a strong position, and a competitor had some influence on that team, they could ask for favours from that team," he said.
"So although there's not allowed to be team orders directly in terms of a radio link there could be inter-team orders." PA