Red Bull driver Vettel says KERS did not cost him pole position for Spanish GP – Formula 1 news
The reigning Formula 1 world champion Sebastian Vettel’s perfect pole scoring run in the 2011 Formula 1 season finally ended after his teammate Mark Webber secured the top spot for the fifth race of the season in Spain.
However, Vettel was not using the Kinetic Energy Recovery System for his Q3 run and believes that the device did not cost him the pole position.
Vettel scored the fastest time of the final free practice session hours before the qualifying session despite the fact that he was having electrical problems with his car during most of the session.
Other than that, there were problems with his KERS device as Q2 of the qualifying round commenced. It is believed that KERS costs around 0.5 seconds with each lap and since Vettel’s time was just 2 tenths of a second shorter than his teammate, reports suggest
that the system was the main reason behind his failure this weekend.
“I'm not afraid [of KERS failing] in the race, I think we will be on top of it again. In the end I think it seems to be a bit of an endless story but the guys are pushing very hard, and I think we did an exceptional job today,” said the reigning world champion.
He added that the team has proved that they have become even quicker now since their aero department made some improvements to the car. He said that they are working very hard in order to fix the problems with the KERS device.
“Yes we are working very hard on the KERS, no I didn't use it for Q2 and Q3 but I'm sure we'll have it tomorrow. It's difficult to say, it's not right to say now 'OK I didn't have KERS - that's why Mark's on pole', I think he deserved pole so he did a better
job today, but sure it was not ideal,” said Vettel.
The upcoming race is going to be very important for Red Bull Racing Team as they will be hoping to finish ahead of McLaren and Ferrari in order to increase their lead further.
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