KERS to play a vital role in 2011 season: Paddy Lowe
Team McLaren are quite confident about the 2011 Formula 1 season and according to their technical director Paddy Lowe, the reintroduction of Kinetic Energy Recovery System in Formula 1 is going to give the top-running teams a lot of advantage.
“Having got this insurance policy on weight distribution, the reintroduction of KERS became much less of a risky option,” said Paddy.
KERS is a device that converts heat energy into kinetic energy before storing it. When a certain amount of energy has been stored in the device, the driver can use that to give his car a sort of boost.
KERS was banned after the 2009 Formula 1 season mainly because of its high cost and the additional weight that it added to the car. The teams were finding it hard to keep their cars within the maximum weight as prescribed by the International Automobile
Federation.
Nevertheless, it was believed that McLaren used KERS at its best in 2009 while Ferrari struggled to get the maximum out of the device. The 2009 championship winners BrawnGP did not use the device at all.
“We know that there’s some real performance there, some real lap time. Also, we found in 2009, as we expected, that using the hybrid system was very powerful for the race start,” said Paddy Lowe.
At McLaren’s launch in Berlin on Friday, Lowe said it had been an ‘easy decision’ to incorporate KERS on the new MP4-26, despite the considerable packaging difficulties. Lowe also stated that the teams who did not use KERS in 2009 lost a place to them even
before the races started.
It is definitely going to be a thrilling season for McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull Racing Team in 2011 since all four teams are expected to be very competitive.
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