Force India will not have KERS in Melbourne

Adrian Sutil supports Force India, his team, on a late introduction of its kinetic energy recovery system (KERS), despite an active partnership and good progress with McLaren-Mercedes.

Precisely, McLaren driver Heikki Kovalainen stated this week that his team was ready to use the KERS from the opening race in Melbourne. However, Force India, which uses the same system as part of its agreement with McLaren, did not test it in Jerez and plans to start the 2009 championship without it.

Sutil still wants to make progress and believes it’s better to wait until the team is completely comfortable with the KERS before using it in a race.

« We are not planning to use it for the first race, so we didn’t test it in Jerez to focus on other things, » confirmed the German.

« It’s not a real disadvantage for the first races because other teams will be in the same situation. There could be reliability issues. It must be well understood before using it. »

He believes that the first priority is reliability, so that Force India can stand out compared to other teams that will likely face issues given the massive changes in regulations.

« Reliability is very important at the beginning, as we saw last year, » he continued.

« We lacked reliability, especially in the first race in Melbourne. There were a lot of incidents, and this year, I think there’s a good chance we’ll witness a rather chaotic race. »

We hope to have a reliable single-seater and that we will be able to finish most of the races.