Renault and Williams F1 Teams May Delay KERS Debuts
January 23, 2009 by admin
Formula 1’s Kinetic Energy Recovery System, otherwise known as KERS, is causing a lot of controversy and some teams may not even use it for the first few races of the season, and Ferrari trying to have it’s introduction delayed until the 2010 season.
It emerged that Williams and Renault, who both unveiled their new cars in Portugal this week, have not decided whether to use their KERS units at the first race of the season in March.
Williams is using a purely mechanical KERS system as favored by FIA President Max Mosely, while Renault, Ferrari and BMW are using electrical battery-based technology.
Renault’s new R29 featured only a dormant KERS version on Monday, with team boss Flavio Briatore hitting out at BMW for vetoing the technology’s delay and condemning the 2009 debut as a “terrible mistake”. He said KERS is dangerous and expensive, and very limited in terms of performance gains.
Fernando Alonso said teams should consider abandoning KERS altogether if it is not fully functional by Melbourne. “You cannot arrive on Friday in Malaysia or Bahrain and think about testing a new solution for KERS. It’s too late by then,” he said.
What is KERS?
KERS allows team to take energy generated under braking, store it, and use it again for a concentrated burst of no more than 60kW of energy (80.5bhp) for a total of 400kJ per lap (i.e. six and two-thirds of a second of 80.5bhp per lap).
There are two technical solutions to this - mechanical and electrical. A mechanical KERS uses a flywheel to retain power under braking; an electrical system, as the name suggests, uses an electric motor twinned with either a battery, capacitor or flywheel.
Although an electrical system may be less efficient, as the energy has to be transferred into electric and then kinetic energy, the lack of any gearing gives it an efficiency saving over a mechanical system. Plus, unlike a mechanical system, the flywheel need not be installed next to the transmission, which could be very useful in a tightly-packaged F1 car.
Formula 1 could have had KERS a decade earlier as Mario Illien created a system for Mercedes in 1999 that used hydraulic fluid pressure to recover energy lost in braking. It would have provided a 45bhp power boost for four seconds but could have been used many times per lap. But the FIA outlawed the system before it could be raced, not wanting to allow cars to get any faster.
Illien’s system nine years ago, then, was not too far off what FIA have now declared legal for 2009. Some of the manufacturer teams have expressed dissatisfaction with how basic the 2009 system is. Even Toyota, who seldom offer criticism of the FIA, claimed KERS was ‘primitive’.
Toyota, of course, markets the Prius hybrid car (which it says has a more advanced KERS system than F1 will have next year) and won a 24-hour race in Japan last year with a Toyota Supra hybrid.
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