Red Bull Racing technical chief Adrian Newey has warned that it may take the team a long time for the team to perfect their Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems in 2011, after both cars suffered problems with the device in Malaysia.
With KERS returning to the grid for 2011, Red Bull started the season in Australia as the only frontrunning team not racing with the energy recovery device on their cars, after team bosses chose to remove it from the cars for reliability reasons.
In Malaysia, both cars had KERS fitted for the race, but Mark Webber's system broke before the start of the race while the team advised Sebastian Vettel to stop using his own KERS button midway through the race.
And despite the otherwise imperious form of the Red Bull squad, Newey has admitted that the team will likely be struggling with their KERS device for some time to come.
"The reality is that it is a system in its infancy," Newey was quoted as saying by the Autosport website.
"We are not a manufacturer team so we are having to develop KERS ourselves, which has not been our area of expertise in the past."
He explained that: "We are also doing it on a limited resource, limited budget and with limited experience, so we are on a rapid learning curve.
"How long it takes us to get to the top of that learning curve remains to be seen."
As far as the problems the drivers suffered in Malaysia was concerned, Newey noted that: "With Mark we had a problem off the [start] line that meant he could not use it at all, during the race, including the start.
"He had a problem on the lap to the startline – it was a fresh problem, not a problem we have had before."
He added: "With Seb – we had a problem that meant we could have continued to run it, but from a safety point of view we thought it best to turn it off and not take any risks."
Newey added that he was still unconvinced that the Red Bull team is clear ahead at the front of the field, saying that McLaren remain a big threat.
"McLaren were much closer in qualifying here than they were in Melbourne," he pointed out.
"How much of that is the nature of the circuit, and how much is that because they have improved their car in the intervening two weeks, I don't know – because I don't know enough about their car."
He added that the relative performance of the two teams will likely be governed by tyre-based issues throughout race weekends this year.
"If you go back to a few years ago, you saw when Ferrari and McLaren were battling for the championship you could see that they used their tyres differently," he muttered thoughtfully.
"That played into one team's hands at one race, and another's at another. There will almost certainly be an element of that this year."
He added: "The tyres are a huge learning curve for all of us, and nobody has a full understanding at the moment.
"I wouldn't say there was a particular set-to-set difference, but quite small changes in balance can create quite large differences in degradation."
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