The question of the qualifying race on Saturday afternoon, before the Grand Prix, found no support at all and rapidly died a natural death. Practice for the Monaco Grand Prix returned to a system used for many years now, whereby the fastest laps in practice got you into the Sunday line-up. The selected ten “ace” drivers were assured of places on the grid, and the remaining six places had to be sorted out from the remaining 11 cars that turned up for practice. Non-arrivals were Soler-Roig, Bell, Andretti and Moser, which eased the problems slightly.
Practice was held on Thursday afternoon, Friday morning and Saturday afternoon, interspersed with Formula Three activities, and all lap times recorded during those three sessions were taken into consideration for selecting the six qualifiers. In addition, at the end of the afternoon on Saturday the non-seeded drivers had an extra 30 minutes to themselves, during which time they could score a place in the select six, but the lap time would not count for the grid position.
This was because the “ace-ten” would not be allowed out in this 30 minutes, and if conditions were extra good they would be unable to defend their grid positions, and the expected situation actually arose. Siffert qualified for the six during the last 30 minutes, and his time would have put him on the second row of the grid, for he equalled Amon’s time during a period when Amon was not allowed to defend his position. Though seemingly complicated the system seemed to work out all right.
