Talking about the development of the KERS unit ahead of their 2009 campaign, Yamashina admitted that his team has made some progress on developing the unit but insisted that costs are also a big part of the equation. If Toyota doesn't want to spend money on a unit not to be implemented in production models, there would be no point in wasting funds that could be redirected elsewhere.
“Yesterday and the day before yesterday we tested with KERS, and we gathered lots of information. If we are confident to get better performance with KERS, and also with good reliability and with good safety, we will use it. Our thinking is also about cost – still it costs too much for each team. Cost, performance, safety and reality we must study from now on. I think a lot of teams still have to analyze the total performance of KERS,” said Yamashina.
“Honestly speaking KERS in F1 is very different from current production cars. From the beginning, I was against this idea for KERS, just on cost grounds. There are development costs, and learning costs, so even if Toyota are not the first team to utilise KERS in F1, I am sure we will not be blamed. We are confident that KERS and the hybrid system are very different, and I am proud of the production car first.”
“Some people have mentioned that through the development of F1 KERS, in the future production cars will have the same type of KERS. But I don't believe that,” added the Toyota F1 principal.
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