While Max Mosley and the teams lock horns in a battle to the death of their series, one of Max’s pet bits of technology seems to have lost the battle for its existence. KERS looks as if it will die a quiet death in the background.
I know, probably no one really cares about KERS at the moment, with all the political stuff going on. But it does seem time to get back to other topics.
At this race, only Ferrari will use KERS. McLaren put KERS on Heikki Kovalainen’s car on Friday, but not on Lewis Hamilton’s, just to see whether it was better to use it or not. The conclusion was, according to Kovalainen, that they could not really come to a conclusion as to whether the car was faster with it or without. So they dropped it for this race. Kovalainen said that in parts of the track it looked like he was faster with it, and in other parts it looked like Lewis was faster without it.
Still, Kovalainen said, “It will make my race tomorrow harder without it,” and he referred specifically to things like the start of the race.
But Fernando Alonso was much clearer in his summation of the state of KERS. When asked if he thought KERS was now finished in F1, he said yes.
“It was a system that was new, a new device in competition, a new device in Formula One, a new system that no one knew how it would work in a Formula One car,” he said. “Four teams did expect some advantage from it, as Renault did, and we found that maybe it was not the case, unfortunately. So now, only Ferrari is running it. So maybe it was not the right time to introduce KERS in Formula One.”
And I’m sure defending KERS is not the first thing on Max’s mind at the moment, either.
Well… I have just returned from talking with Ross Brawn - some half an hour or more since I posted the above - and it turns out that, guess what? KERS is part of the major complaints that the FOTA teams have with the direction the rules are going in F1 next year, Brawn said. So it would seem Max certainly is defending it. Brawn had lots to say about it, but suffice it to say that with even BMW Sauber today saying it will not use KERS again this season, and with Ross pointing out that “hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent on it and only two cars are using it this weekend” we do seem to have an idea that has seen its time
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