RBR and KERS

JRS

JRS

JRS

Soldato
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So, three races in and my, haven't the reigning Constructors Champions done well with KERS so far? Didn't really run it at all in Aus, ran it for a short time before it broke on both cars in Malaysia, and then much the same story yesterday in China it seems.

Newey, Marshall and Prodromou have designed a fabulous F1 car in the RB7. In almost all departments, it's at least half a step ahead of the field. So given the headaches caused so far, the compromised races, why don't they just pull KERS from the car completely for the next couple of race weekends while the factory gets a handle on the problems? Or is it a case of having KERS for part of the weekend being much better than having no KERS at all?
 
They have no choice but to soldier on with it. If Mclaren get close to the cars pace it will be too easy to pass a red bull with DRS and KERs. The Red bull would be over 150bhp down in an overtake and equal if the red bull was trying to pass.

If this was 2010 tyres they could run the car without Kers and make that 0.7 advantage pay all season long. The tyres though are so unpredicatable it's too risky not to develope it.

I said before the season many times this would happen to Red Bull and people assumed they would just use the renault system (which wasn't great anyway) but I personally think it's really good for atleast one of the teams that bothered running it in 2009 to get some payback and advantage for all the work they put in prior to 2009.

It's a lot of testing mileage the other cars have to catch up on.

I imagine they are testing it in races in different formats on the cars, which is why Webbers seems to be unuseable and sebs intermittent. With no testing it's the only way to test different ideas I guess.

One thing though, If you are Lewis struggling to pass a RB in a duel you would be confident sooner or later the RB Kers system would give up, gifting you a pass.
 
dannyjo22 said:
I imagine they are testing it in races in different formats on the cars, which is why Webbers seems to be unuseable and sebs intermittent. With no testing it's the only way to test different ideas I guess.
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Or Frankenstein it onto an old car or some other car ...
 
It's strange though that one car loses it and the other car gets it back intermittently.
Surely they must be running split testing ideas to try to speed up developement?

I do wonder if they will free up the Kers regs a bit when other teams have reliable systems, instead of letting Mclaren and Ferrari walk have too big an advantage early on.
 
Has there been any official word on what the KERS issue actually is? I do remember when it was around last time quite afew of the failures were not able to be fixed properly if it all because the wiring for the system was run through the chassis itself making it a nightmare to fix.
 
There is no way they can just abandon it, just look at Hamiltons little KERS boost as he flew by Vettel for example, sink or swim time for RBR. Does provide amazing entertainment though!
 
Christian Horner has already said that Newey would not compromise the car for Kers so I expect it is having to be packaged in all sort of odd places and as such overheating. They need it to defend against DRS/kers and they need it at the start. So unless they can get 1/2 at qauli yin and make it to first corner first without kers then they need it.
 
deleted said:
There is no way they can just abandon it, just look at Hamiltons little KERS boost as he flew by Vettel for example, sink or swim time for RBR. Does provide amazing entertainment though!
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Was partly to do with Tyres as well....

Saying that, at the moment I'm quite liking seeing them failing with KERs, if they had it right, the results would be almost too predictable right now....

Even without it Webber absolutely beasted most of the pack....

As far as I'm aware at the moment it's an overheating problem that's giving them issues (may be wrong, but that's what I think it is)

kd
 
Memphis said:
Like Vettel did in Australia? Oh wait...
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Both the Mclarens had pretty bad starts in Aus, and the run to T1 is tiny compared to most other tracks. You only have to look at Webbers start, he had a decent one and got past Hamilton, then Hamilton pressed the Kers button and drove straight back past Webber. If the Mclarens had started well in Aus they would have been very close into T1.
 
deko said:
Both the Mclarens had pretty bad starts in Aus, and the run to T1 is tiny compared to most other tracks. You only have to look at Webbers start, he had a decent one and got past Hamilton, then Hamilton pressed the Kers button and drove straight back past Webber. If the Mclarens had started well in Aus they would have been very close into T1.
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What he said.

Australia is an unusual track. What happened to Webber at Malaysia is more representative of what they can expect. And KERS makes it harder to get back through the field as well.
 
rypt said:
Only not allowed to test the latest car
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That can't be right or Ferrari would still be pounding round the test track every day in last years car?

Surely they wouldn't get any tyres?

The regs must be tighter than just the latest car because you never hear anything of them running a hybrid. Or like some did in pre-season last years car with add ons.
 
RBR are just going through the same steep learning curve that Ferrari and others went through just as publicly a couple of years ago; I remember one of their drivers jumping out of the car because the battery pack had overheated and was smoking.

Rapid charging creates a lot of heat and cooling an F1 car is marginal at best. With the tightly packaged battery pack RBR are using they're clearly finding it more challenging than expected.

Webber's drive showed that as important as KERS is, having a set of new tyres is far more important. Not all tracks are as wide of forgiving as Shanghai but even so having an extra 80hp is no good if you don't have the traction to put the power down early enough or slow the car down into the next corner.
 
dannyjo22 said:
That can't be right or Ferrari would still be pounding round the test track every day in last years car?

Surely they wouldn't get any tyres?

The regs must be tighter than just the latest car because you never hear anything of them running a hybrid. Or like some did in pre-season last years car with add ons.
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You don't need exact spec tyres to test test KERS

And are you forgetting Schumi pounding around in an old Ferrari running GP2 tyres?
 
rypt said:
You don't need exact spec tyres to test test KERS

And are you forgetting Schumi pounding around in an old Ferrari running GP2 tyres?
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I'm sure the rules can't be that simple or why are Ferrari not testing aero on the old chassis. Where is the line drawn on what you can and cannot test on the old chassis?

I remember him doing testing but that must have been 3 years ago?
 
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