Ferrari and McLaren shared some rare common ground over the KERS issue. (LAT photo) » More Photos

Unusually McLaren appeared to share some common ground with Ferrari, for the Italian team has expressed its doubts.

“It’s a regulation, it’s not compulsory,” said team principal Stefano Domenicali. “So we are working and pushing in order to be able to use this system that potentially and from a simulation point of view it seems to give an important benefit to the performance of the car. But you have to be good on the throttle because otherwise if you put the weight of the system in comparison to what you’re going to gain, you really need to find the right compromise. We need to wait and see what will be the future of KERS in the next couple of years.”

In contrast, Honda is totally behind KERS. At the Turkish GP Ross Brawn revealed to me that Honda has already run a basic KERS system in its F1 car, making the Japanese manufacturer almost certainly the first team to do so.

“We’ve run it on a car for the first time,” he said. “Not at a very high level, but we’ve got it functioning.”

Brawn said he understood why some teams have been so vocal in their criticism of KERS.

“That’s inevitable. In some ways I can understand the contradiction of cost cutting and then introducing technologies that are actually quite expensive. But for a manufacturer like ourselves, the technology has become relevant again. It’s valuable from that perspective, so we’re quite keen on it. We’ve got new groups of engineers involved in our program which we didn’t have before.”

However, he agreed that it might be wrong to increase its role too quickly:

“There’s this difficult balance where we want to give it enough performance to make it worthwhile, but if there’s too much performance, it becomes compulsory, and then the small teams struggle, I’m not sure where the balance lies on that. I think we need to start running it to see what equilibrium we’ve got and see if we need to broaden the regulations to give it more potential advantage.”

We certainly haven’t heard the last of this story, and KERS is turning into a fascinating, multi-faceted subject, that has sporting, commercial and technical implications. We in the F1 press complain that teams don’t have much technical freedom these days, and here is a great example of just that. Whether Mosley’s insistence that it is road car relevant remains to be seen, but the PR benefits of F1 being seen to make an effort in the “green” direction are clear. And if it really does improve the racing, who will complain about that?

Adam Cooper is a Senior Writer for RACER magazine. For details about the current issue, visit www.racer.com.