Nick Wirth: Kinetic Energy Recovery System is not worth its price – Formula 1 news
Virgin Racing Team recently revealed their new car the MVR-02 in London and the team admitted that they did not use the Kinetic Energy Recovery System mainly because of its financial cost.
They said that it is not easy to enable it to perform at its best. Other than that, the device is quite heavy which costs almost 3 tenths of a second.
KERS is a device which has the ability to convert heat energy into kinetic energy before storing it for later use after a certain amount of energy has been stored in order to give the car a sort of a “boost” whenever and wherever the driver wants.
“The fact is it is extremely expensive and extremely heavy and it is worth about three tenths of a second - we're after three seconds,” explained technical director Nick Wirth at the car’s launch in London on Monday.
The team is trying to focus more on reliability and hydraulics in order to gain some advantage in terms of consistency over its rivals according to Wirth. Other than that, Virgin Racing Team tried to come up with an exhaust system in its simulators similar
to the one Renault came up with this year but the team realised that it is not as easy as it looks to come up with a similar system while keeping the rest of the elements of the car balanced.
“We understand why they [Renault] are doing it, but you need to be a team like Renault from the financial, human and technical resources standpoint to implement it. So we're happy with our solution,” Nick added.
The team is hoping for the best possible results in 2011 and they are pretty sure that they will give a much better performance than they did back in 2010.
Timo Glock recently stated that he is not expecting anything surreal from the team but he is pretty sure that they will have a better car than they had in 2010.
“Realistically you do not make up three or four seconds over the winter, but hopefully we can be closer to the midfield teams,” he said.
Virgin Racing Team became a part of the sport in 2010 along with 2 other new teams namely Lotus Racing Team and Hispania Racing Team. Unfortunately, all three of them failed to score a single point throughout the season but it is believed that they will
be much better in 2011.
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