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F1: Honda has Already Tried KERS, Says Brawn
Written by: Adam Cooper
RACER Magazine   http://www.racer.com/speedtv
05/10/2008 - 05:08 PM
Istanbul, Turkey
 
Brawn and Honda have already tried an energy recovery system. (LAT photo) ยป More Photos

Honda F1's Ross Brawn has revealed that Honda has already run a basic kinetic energy recovery system (KERS) in its F1 car, making the Japanese manufacturer almost certainly the first team to do so. Brawn did not elaborate in whether it happened at the recent Barcelona test or a more private outing such as a straightline or aero test venue.

“We’ve run it on a car for the first time,” Brawn told SPEEDtv.com. “Not at a very high level, but we’ve got it functioning.” Asked for more details of when and where, he would only say recently.”

Brawn said he understood why some teams have been so vocal in their criticism of KERS.

“That’s inevitable. I some ways I can understand the contradiction of cost cutting and then introducing technologies that are actually quite expensive. But for a manufacturer like ourselves, the technology has become relevant again. It’s valuable from that perspective, so we’re quite keen on it. We’ve got new groups of engineers involved in our program which we didn’t have before.”

The debate that is now going on in F1 is focused not on the principle of KERS, which will definitely arrive in its basic form in 2009, but on the FIA’s intention to make it play a greater role in the years that follow.

“There’s this difficult balance where we want to give it enough performance to make it worthwhile,
but if there’s too much performance, it becomes compulsory, and then the small teams struggle, I’m not sure where the balance lies on that. I think we need to start running it to see what equilibrium we’ve got and see if we need to broaden the regulations to give it more potential advantage.”

Meanwhile, Brawn says that the tire situation in Turkey is anything but clear cut. Jenson Button, along with Lewis Hamilton, qualified on the harder tire. Honda is likely to use the hard tire at the start, and Brawn says he expects to see different strategies up and down the pitlane.

“I think it’s going to be difficult for everybody. We’re certainly thinking of starting on primes and finishing on options, and letting the track come more towards us, because we struggled with the option today. So that’s the most likely scenario for us.

“It seems a complete scatter. Lewis had primes and Heikki had the options. It seems if you can get the options to work, you can gain a few tenths. In our case we lost some tire, certainly with Jenson, he was a lot slower on the option.

“I think we’re fairly comfortable on the prime, which is why we may push the option to become the sort of default tire at the end of the race -- when hopefully it won’t make a huge difference.”
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