It now seems certain that the future purpose of the much vaunted KERS energy recovery system is to enable F1 anoraks to look smug when its name appears on the question sheet of the local pub quiz in a few years time.
Expensive, unreliable and of unproven merit, all the F1 teams want shot of it save BMW which, in the interest of keeping the peace among FOTA members (and because it has no choice but to go with majority opinion) will not use it next year either.
It won’t be banned but nor does it need to be: another slice of high grade F1 anoraxia is that you could have entered F1 in 1954 with a car powered by a supercharged 750cc engine. Nobody did because nobody was quite that stupid.
I was one of the few that welcomed KERS because I thought it would encourage overtaking and require addition skill from the driver to master, ensuring the gap between the best and worst pedallers on the grid became more pronounced.
But as the half way point of the season approaches, no KERS car has even looked like winning a race and is now being used as much as anything by drivers of Ferraris and McLarens to prevent overtaking by theoretically quicker non-KERS car.
In fact and as far as I can see, its only real merit is to have proven such a blind alley that it at least assisted in making the big money teams design uncompetitive cars, precipitating the first really big shake up in the F1 hierarchy in decades.
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