Renault brings back KERS for Monza

[John S]

Well this is going to confuse our pole pick choices a bit, guess we shall have to wait for practice to see what it means.

By Pablo Elizalde, Today, Autosport

The Renault team has decided to bring back its Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) for this weekend's Italian Grand Prix.

Renault has not used KERS since the Spanish Grand Prix in May, having decided that it was not offering a sufficient advantage to justify its use.

However, with KERS-equipped cars having proved the benefits of the system in recent races, the French team has decided to re-introduce it at Monza.

The team's director of engineering Pat Symonds reckons KERS will be worth at least a quarter of a second per lap at the fast Italian tack.

"There are three aspects of KERS that need to be considered: laptime, the advantage it gives from the start, and the ability to assist overtaking," said Symonds.

"Firstly, the gain in lap time of running KERS in Monza is likely to be around a quarter of a second and it's worth even more in qualifying as you can do one release before you start a timed lap and another release during the timed lap.

"In terms of the advantage at the start, it's a long way from the grid to the first corner in Monza and KERS will give an advantage of well over fifteen metres compared with non-KERS cars.

"For assisting overtaking, you have to remember that Monza is a circuit where it's very difficult to overtake, but running KERS certainly won't disadvantage us in that respect. All these factors combine to make Monza a very favourable circuit for KERS."

[Jericoke]

Surely McLaren and Ferrari were continuing to work on KERS to make it work with their car.  Hopefully Renault doesn't think just dropping in a system from May will suddenly propel Alonso to the top.

I hope they've been working on it, and will decide to keep it for next year.

[FW14B]

It will be interesting to see how their unit performs now, I thought it was a bit rubbish at the beginning of the season?