Getting KERS right will be detrimental to a teams performance, that’s the view of Red Bull’s technical chief Adrian Newey.
Red Bull will run the system for the first time during a season, although they ran with it in 2009 pre-season testing, they opted to dump the system to concentrate on other areas.
This year however, the 2010 champions will use the energy recovery system, as will the all the teams minus Team Lotus, HRT and Virgin.
Newey is hoping the Milton Keynes based outfit has managed to package the unit correctly to ensure it doesn’t have a negative effect on the aerodynamics.
“Packaging is the challenge with KERS and the big challenge is to try and come up with a solution that doesn’t compromise the aerodynamics too much, otherwise you drop the performance benefit that you gain from running KERS,” he said whilst in Valencia.
The real benefit of running the system was clearly seen during the 2009 season, with the McLaren’s, Ferrari’s and Renault’s gaining ground at the start, which is something Newey is fully aware of.
“We are here to try hard to try and develop it through the pre-season so that we are confident that it does give us performance. I think one of the things that came clearly in 2009 was that the start-line performance of KERS was important.
“Fortunately the team that we were battling with, which was Brawn that year, also didn’t have KERS so neither had an advantage over the other in that sense, so this year I think no doubt with McLaren and Ferrari and Mercedes having KERS and being extremely competitive, then we need to get it to work if for no other reason than simply performance off the line.”
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