Mercedes KERS available to Brawn GP


By Phil Huff
May 19 2009

The Mercedes KERS unit currently used by McLaren has been offered to Brawn GP, but it's by no means certain that the championship leading team will make use of the technology.

Widely regarded to be the best KERS system in F1, the Mercedes box is significantly lighter and more compact than many rival units. As with all the KERS systems, it allows a driver to access and extra 80bhp (60KW) for a total of 6.67 seconds a lap. This offers many obvious advantages, but at the cost of extra base weight on the car, a higher centre of gravity, and some extra packaging and therefore aerodynamic issues.

"Mercedes have made it available to us," explained Ross Brawn, the Brawn GP team principal. "We've just got to find a way of fitting it to the car and not compromising the handling, because the car wasn't designed for their system."

The Honda system that the car was designed to take works on a different principle. It is understood that the Honda designed unit had half the components sitting underneath the chassis, just ahead of the drivers safety cell, leaving less mass to be stored further back in the car, aiding weight distribution.

"The biggest issue that we have is overall weight," continued Brawn, "because in fitting the Mercedes engine we added a reasonable amount of weight to the car with all the modifications we had to make. Although theirs is a very light system, we've lost the capacity that we need to install their system and add the ballast that we need to get the right weight distribution."

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