Red Bull Racing team boss Christian Horner says that he will not rush the team's KERS device onto their cars for the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend, despite acknowledging that it will be an advantage around the Sepang track.
The Red Bull squad chose not to run with their KERS devices on the Saturday and Sunday during the Australian Grand Prix, after their tests of the system on Friday led the team to question the reliability of the device.
Despite the lack of the extra power boost, though, Sebastian Vettel still won the race by more than twenty seconds from his nearest rival.
And Horner admitted this weekend that the team is still not certain to run with KERS in Sepang, despite the fact that the extra speed from the unit is likely to be a bigger benefit around the Malaysian track than it was in Melbourne.
"It didn't hurt us too much [to run without KERS] at the last race," he muttered to BBC radio over the weekend, "But it is, you have to remember, a free extra 80 horsepower, so over a lap it's effectively free lap time of anything between 0.3-0.4s."
He added: "Obviously the motivation and desire is to have it onto the car as quickly as possible, but we won't compromise the performance of the car or the potential reliability of the car if we feel that the system isn't race-sturdy yet."
He also expressed confidence that the extra work done on the KERS device by the team since Melbourne, as well as the extra data they secured during the Friday practice test of the kit in Australia, meant that they were now 'confident' that their boost system would work reliably.
"It was a very close call during the Australian Grand Prix weekend as to whether we leave it on the car or take it off," he muttered.
"In the end we made a collective decision that there was a risk involved and therefore we decided not to run the system because the benefits at a type of circuit like Melbourne - other than at the start - were fairly limited.
"Obviously those benefits at other circuits become more apparent."
He went on: "We ran the system on Friday [in Australia], it ran without any real issue, and it was purely based on a lack of mileage on the system that our confidence was relatively low.
"I think now, armed with that mileage, and having inspected all the components, our confidence has grown - and hopefully if it runs well on Friday in Malaysia it will make its race debut during the Malaysia weekend."
Red Bull were the only frontrunning team not to run KERS in Australia, though the benefit of the energy recovery devices, which have not fundamentally changed since being unsuccessfully pioneered in 2009, remained questionable.
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