According to the Malaysian official, the unit would cause some dramatic rethinking of the weight distribution for next year's car, something that Lotus are not looking to deal with in the off-season.
“We will not use KERS next year and we have good reasons for this decision. This year we had to buy nearly all the (car) parts from other suppliers but now we are in a position to build the entire car in our factory,” Fernandes was quoted as saying in an interview with Finland's Turun Sanomat.
“If we were to have KERS, in accordance with the technical working group (decision), we would have to start everything again from zero in terms of weight distribution. The big teams are in a different boat, already with solid experience of KERS from recent years,” further argued the Lotus F1 team principal.
“What we saw last season is that it is not easy to get KERS to operate effectively and reliably; it took a lot of time, money and resources. At Lotus we are fully confident that we are going to cope without it (KERS),” added Fernandes, whose team will probably not fight for the front-running spots anyway next year.
The current discussions within the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) evolve around a potential standard unit, able to produce around 150HP of boost for a maximum of 10 seconds per lap. That would be almost double the amount of power as compared to the units used last year, when only 80HP were produced for about 7 seconds.
Another thing worth mentioning is that KERS is not mandatory in Formula One, and will likely remain so until the new engine rules in 2013.
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