It's all very well to have an idea, whether it be a plan to revolutionise Formula One or a sudden brainwave revolving around jam/mayonnaise fusion sandwich fillings. But it is quite another to make that idea succeed, especially when nobody can know what the future will bring.
F1 has never been a sport overly-blessed with green credentials. On most Greenpeace Christmas card lists, it was probably somewhere below the guy who was steering the Exxon Valdez. But the first step on the long and rocky road to appeasement began a couple of years ago, with the announcement that kinetic energy recovery technology would be introduced to the sport in order to give technologists a new gadget to play with, and also give a ready-made excuse for F1 as it continually stamped it's carbon footprint across the globe.
Well, that was what was supposed to happen. What we got instead was an unmitigated sham. During testing of the tricky KERS devices, BMW had a mechanic collapse after receiving a nasty electric shock from their car, the Red Bull factory nearly burned down after an accident with their own nascent system, and Kimi Raikkonen had a fire extinguisher go off in his face during practice for the Malaysian GP this year which was caused by a faulty KERS system.
Added to that, only four of the teams on the grid have run their KERS system (is that a tautology?) this year, and only Ferrari equipped their cars with the device in the latest race at Silverstone. The death knell was sounding out forlornly long before the FOTA teams voted to get rid of the systems, and just this weekend, BMW Sauber announced that they were giving up on their own system for good. Though credit long-term KERS advocate Mario Theissen with having a half-hearted go at claiming the whole venture had been anything other than a massive failure. "Given the very short development time it has been a huge success to get it up and running reliably and our system really works fine. We didn't have any flaws, not even in Malaysia in the torrential rain," the BMW boss insisted. And yet still, the batteries were taken out forever, like a remote control for a broken, abandoned TV.
The problem with KERS was two-fold. Firstly, while 'going green' was all the rage a couple of years ago, the financial collapse of the world's skittish economy has meant that cost-cutting is now more important to companies than carbon-cutting. While teams may have been happy to throw money on a fire created by an exploding KERS device this time last year, now there is little call to spend stupid amounts on developing an unreliable, uncooperative and largely unnecessary piece of technology. With the only other real nod to helping the environment in F1 being the staggeringly pointless 'Make Cars Green' tyre-painting in Fuji last year, the whole caring for the environment aspect of the sport has been quietly shelved until someone finds some spare cash at some point in the future.
So the money isn't there to justify developing KERS any further, but maybe that wouldn't have made teams drop it quite so quickly if it, y'know, actually had some sort of point. But the fact is that the way the KERS idea has been implemented on F1 is a crying mess.
With the teams forced to set their systems up to provide a standard 80 extra horsepower a lap for 6 and a bit seconds, there was no real need or advantage in creating a particularly efficient device, beyond reducing the weight of it to try and mitigate the chronic extra kilograms that the batteries added to the car's weight. So there was no real competitive aspect to the whole development process. Allowing a turbo-boost free-for-all to develop where one team came up with a system efficient enough to grant near-permanent extra speed or a stupidly-high extra horsepower boost may well have ended up making the whole situation ludicrous, not to mention dangerous, but the FIA could have at least introduced a band of performance that the teams could aim for, rather than a specific figure.
Alternatively, if the system was to remain set to a standard amount of boost, then the rules could have accepted the device for the gimmick that it was, and approached the whole thing in the appropriate way. The A1GP series has a "power boost" button, as did Champ Car in it's dying years, and both series restricted each driver to a certain number of uses of the 'turbo' button per race. While the "push-to-pass" regulations were mocked by some for their shameless attempt to induce some action on often-staid fields, what it did do was add a tactical edge to the boost procedure. A driver would have to be careful when and why they used their dozen or so nitro spurts, and, despite the comical theatre of the principle, there was many a late-race duel where a driver with no boosts left sought to fend off a driver who still had one or two decisive button presses to make. Would the guy behind waste his two chances, or could he use the system to his advantage?
KERS in F1, though, didn't do that. By allowing the drivers a standard amount of extra power per lap, they were generally using the same boost for the same time at the same place every lap, usually (and not especially tactically) halfway down the longest straight. Aside from a couple of dicey moments when Fernando Alonso used his extra power to temporarily get round the enormous performance deficit of his Renault, and enjoy a tasty scrap with Mark Webber at the same time, KERS was mainly used as a metronomic overtaking-hinderer.
Of course, it didn't help that the few teams that did run the system turned out to be rather slow this year, meaning that they usually had to use it to keep faster cars behind them rather than using it to scrap with each other at the front, but had the systems been adopted on every car, you could imagine the overall effect being nulled as every driver used it at the same point and cancelled their competitors power boost out.
For KERS to have worked as an overtaking aid in F1, it would have required one driver to decide not to use the system at the optimal point, which is never going to happen because F1 these days won't allow a resource to be used in a sub-optimal way (with the possible exception of Nelson Piquet Jr). That is why the set number of boosts method would have worked so much better, so long as the powers that be accepted what the fans had suspected from the start, that KERS was little more than a publicity-seeking trick.
But they didn't, and so the unloved, F1-spec KERS experiment has failed. And perhaps, given the way that it was implemented, that is probably for the best. From now on, if F1 wants to be green, it should probably just go and plant some trees.
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