Red Bull moving closer to KERS for Malaysia

Red Bull will probably need KERS to continue their dominant form in Malaysia

After ditching the device during the Australian Grand Prix weekend, Red Bull are becoming more confident of using KERS next weekend in Malaysia.

After reliability concerns, the KERS unit was removed from Vettel’s and Webber’s cars after Friday Practice. However, it made little difference to their crushing pace, as Vettel dominated from pole to flag.

With a longer pit straight in Sepang, not using the innovation would be a large disadvantage to the Milton Keynes outfit.

While last week’s decision as more precautionary rather than anything more serious, Christian Horner says that his team is now more confident with KERS:

"We ran the system on Friday 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.

It didn't hurt us too much at the last race, 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.

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."