riff_raff wrote:The reason the FIA wants to introduce this KERS device has nothing to do with being environmentally sensitive. It has to do with improving the "show". The 5 or 6 seconds of power boost the KERS provides will assist one car passing another more easily. ....
While I'm inclined to let this slip as personal opinion it sticks up as inconsistent with what we know from public sources. FIA and GPMA reached agreement about a number of strategic issues ranging from engines to KERS and published the road map for this after high level talks were conducted between Mosley and Göschl.
The manufacturers and the FIA said that they see KERS and HERS as an important element of F1 doing research for road cars. They are hoping that the environmental effect of F1 research will have a huge leverage by speeding up the practical application to road cars.
I don't know how they arrived at the decision to impose the known restrictions of how much power to store and energy to release but it must have been motivated by some complex horse trading. but surely the general decision to do KERS and HERS was the strategic issue they shared. the boost became a tactic found as a means of implementation.
Flywheel safety will be an important issue and I can imagine that the manufacturers have spend a great deal of thought on how to contain that energy when something goes wrong. certainly the failure mode of a turbine blade and a composite fly wheel are vastly different in terms of bits starting to fly off at high speed.
In the meantime Autosport had interesting news
Honda first to run KERS in car
By Jonathan Noble Sunday, May 11th 2008, 07:16 GMT
Honda Racing are believed to have become the first team to run a version of the new Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) that will be allowed in Formula One next year.
Although most teams are still finalising their concepts and working on the devices on test dynos, Honda's team principal Ross Brawn revealed at the Turkish Grand Prix that his team have already taken to the track with theirs.
When asked by autosport.com about the timetable for running the new systems in a car, Brawn said: "We've run it on a car for the first time. Not at a very high level but we've got it functioning."
Brawn would not expand on when the KERS had run, however, saying only that it was "recently."
The news of Honda's first test comes against the backdrop of further discussions between team principals over the Turkish weekend about the long-term future direction of KERS technology.
There was a lengthy meeting between a majority of team bosses on Force India boss Vijay Mallya's boat the Indian Empress on Friday night, as teams discussed the financial implications of developing KERS over the next few years.
Brawn believes, however, that accepting KERS is the correct way forward for F1 - and wholly relevant for car manufacturers involved in the sport.
"In some ways I can understand the contradiction of cost-cutting and then introducing technologies which are quite expensive," he said. "But for manufacturers like ourselves the technology has become relevant again, so it is valuable from that perspective.
"But there is this difficult balance of we want to give it enough performance to make it worthwhile, but if it has too much performance then it becomes compulsory and the small teams struggle. I am not quite sure where the balance is.
"We need to start running it to see what equilibrium we have got, and then see if we need to broaden the regulations to give it more potential advantage."
so Honda use other platforms for testing. have they put it in a IRL car to go around the F1 testing?
