Red Bull technical chief Adrian Newey has admitted that the caffeinated team has prioritised KERS development too low down their tasks for 2011, as the championship leaders continue to be hindered by their troublesome boost system.
The Red Bull team have suffered some form of KERS failure on at least one of their cars in every race weekend so far in 2011.
The most recent incident seeing Sebastian Vettel only being able to get intermittent use from the device when fighting off Lewis Hamilton for the lead of the Spanish GP last weekend.
The team have admitted that they made compromises with their KERS system with regards to fitting it into Newey's aerodynamic package for 2011, and this appears to have caused a number of problems, particularly with the cooling of the batteries.
And Newey admitted on Thursday that the team had perhaps underestimated the workload they would need to put in to their new KERS systems.
"KERS is a complicated project," the aerodynamics wizard chortled in Thursday's press conference, "It needs a lot of research, lots of development."
He explained: "The packaging route that we have chosen...has been altered in various ways to suit the package we want for our car.
"That has caused some problems. It's not proving easy to completely eliminate it. We have hopefully learnt how to change it, but it is challenging for us."
He added: "It is not really our forte, KERS development. We are an aerodynamics and, sort of, chassis composite engineering group rather than a KERS group."
As far as finding reasons for their KERS struggles, Newey suggested that the team had not allocated enough resources to their project, saying: "We have [a new KERS department], but the department is quite small.
"With hindsight probably a little bit too small and there is quite a lot of inertia to these things. It is not easy to react quickly to a problem."
Red Bull have based their KERS device on the Renault unit used in 2009, but started their 2011 development behind the likes of McLaren and Ferrari, who both ran the boost systems at race weekends during 2009.
Red Bull did not run KERS that year, and the technology was put on hiatus by the teams for 2010 due to cost concerns.
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