Whitmarsh: KERS eulogy
June 25, 2009 by Negative Camber
Filed under Prime & Option
Martin Whitmarsh, McLaren team boss, has given his opinion on why KERS failed in F1. Explaining to Autosport his impression on why KERS failed and what it means to McLaren, Mr. Whitmarsh is very candid about the reasons and even more candid about how its introduction into F1 actually caused some of McLaren’s pain this season in the performance area. Check out the story here.
Interesting is that Mr. Whitmarsh feels this was a grand distraction for McLaren as they were focused on KERS and it cost them resources and energy that otherwise would ahve been spent on things like…oh, say…a diffuser?
“We were behind on the development of the overall aero concept, and we have put a lot of effort into KERS because F1 was committing to it. Looking back we could have made some different decisions, but that is how hindsight works.”
But as F1B has said from the beginning, this is a clear example of Max’s pragmatic black hole that actually costs the teams more money and he has the wherewithal to scold the teams on how much they spend.
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At this point, if KERS had played into fuel strategy [keep you out an extra lap or two], it might have been worth something in F1 and to production cars.
Of course, with the then-expected loss of refueling, why develop that way?
Just totally not thought out, from my vantage.
Good point, SJ Skid. While there may be a relevance to road cars, with the advent of a fuelless pitstop, KERS main benefit in current form is to save a little fuel and have power on demand. If KERS had any more output, we would have tracks like Silverstone that couldn’t utilize it because you couldn’t fully charge the lithium ion batter pack. And the overall point that developing a bunch of different new rules that seem to counteract one another seems pretty silly; these are the very rules that are increasing the cost to participate in the sport.
how about turbos and bodyworks full of solar cells? That way you save fuel, have more HP’s and you dont need lots of braking zones….
They’ll recoup their money when a KERS element becomes a component of the 20013 engine tech spec.
It’s obvious why it didn’t work – the rules only allowed for 80hp boost for 8 seconds per lap. That doesn’t give enough advantage to overcome the weight disadvantage. If the rules allowed for quite a bit more boost or longer boost time per lap then everyone would be doing it.
That was my take on it as well. If it doesn’t improve overall lap times, team engineers have little use for it.