KERS not as efficient as expected – Antonio Cuquerella
The FIA issued an official drivers list and rules and regulations report that confirmed that the teams will be allowed to use KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) for the 2011 Formula 1 season along with some other rule changes. One of the main rule changes
other than this was the legality of team orders which is not going to be appreciated by most of the fans.
With the re-introduction of KERS it is expected that Brawn GP; now known as Team Mercedes, will rise once again and they might even have the pace to compete against the top running teams Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari.
However, some of the teams are not happy about the re-introduction of KERS including HRT’s engineer Antonio Cuquerella who believes that KERS is not as efficient as the FIA and team’s thought it would be.
Since KERS adds a lot of weight to the car, that affects the cars performance a lot and as a result, some of the drivers have decided to lose some weight including Fernando Alonso. KERS is basically a device that converts Heat Energy, gained while braking,
into Kinetic energy and stores it. This enables the drivers to have a sort of a boost with them (almost similar to the ones we see in cartoons like wacky races).
HRT’s engineer believes that KERS has been re-introduced in the sport once again due to marketing reasons but it is hard to agree with that statement.
“It is a fashionable green technology that helps to sell more [road] cars. It's inefficient but the large manufacturers want it to sell their cars. A lot of the manufacturers want KERS as a tool of their marketing departments to justify their investments
in Formula One,” Antonio told the media.
Back running teams namely HRT and Virgin are not going to use KERS at all while the top running teams are quite happy with the system. Cuquerella, who used to work with BMW before HRT, was recently questioned at a university in Valencia on the logic of bringing KERS back
to the sport.
“It is true that we were disadvantaged compared to having a driver like Trulli, but there is no doubt that the car was slow as well,” he conceded.
He also addressed Colin Kolles' claim, who stated that it was HRT’s inexperienced drivers’ fault that the team was unable to perform in their debut season, as this was quite an absurd statement by the team boss.
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