Marussia to use Williams KERS in 2013

2013 F1 season

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Marussia will use a Kinetic Energy Recovery System for the first time in 2013.

Technical consultant Pat Symonds confirmed the team’s 2013 MR02 chassis will incorporate KERS in a Q&A released by the team.

“Yes we will be using KERS next year,” said Symonds. “We plan to adopt the system that has been developed by Williams, which was used by them with the Cosworth engine last year and is currently with their Renault-engine car.

“Our 2013 unit is a development of this. We’ve been very impressed with the engineering, the efficiency and the weight. Williams are also a pleasure to work with both technically and commercially.”

There will be no change in the team’s choice of engine supplier: “We will continue with the Cosworth engine.”

“We are happy with the work we are doing with them and I think that we are working together to try and improve the areas that we are able to under the regulations. We are concentrating on improving the driveability of the engine and enhancing its performance as a unit with the car.”

The team’s 2013 car is “on schedule”, he added. “As always, it’s a tight schedule, but that’s the way it should be if you want to bring maximum performance to the car.

“There are some reasonably significant changes, but in many ways it’s a progression of the MR01 – the lessons we have learnt from that car, from racing it now for half a season and some of the things that we wanted to do to that car that we simply didn’t have time to do last year. So everything is on schedule and we are looking forward to a productive winter of testing and a strong start to the 2013 season.”

“Very pleased” with wind tunnel progress

Symonds declared himself pleased with the progress the team had made since it began to use a wind tunnel for development:

“The wind tunnel programme commenced at the end of last year. It takes quite a long while to build the very sophisticated models that we use in a Formula One wind tunnel, and therefore the influence of that programme was not really felt in the first iterations of the MR01.

“As we progressed through the early part of the season, we were able to bring relatively small upgrades to the car as a result of the wind tunnel programme, but our first major upgrade was the one we introduced at Silverstone.

“Just to give some examples of that, we had a new nose, which had a preliminary release from aerodynamics towards the end of May, having been in the tunnel in the third week of May. The sidepods and the exhaust were developed at a similar time.

“The rear wing, which was totally new, began even earlier and we saw the preliminary aero release of that towards the end of April, the May wind tunnel session providing the opportunity to tune that.

“So really, by the end of May, we’d defined our Silverstone upgrade and we spent June on the detailed design and manufacturing the hardware that we needed for the race at Silverstone.”

Symonds said the Silverstone upgrade had delivered in line with the team’s expectations: “We’re very pleased with the correlation we’re seeing from the wind tunnel.

“We’re using the McLaren Applied Technologies wind tunnel as part of our technical partnership and, generally speaking, I think our predictions from that are being seen on the circuit, both in the measurements that we take on the Friday during free practice and indeed in the improved performance that we are seeing on the car.

“We still have a number of upgrades that we can bring to the car this season. We are fortunate in a way that the 2013 aerodynamics regulations are quite similar to the 2012 regulations and therefore components that we are developing now can be common to the end of this season and indeed the start of next season on the 2013 car.

“So while certainly our focus now is on 2013, we have improvements for Spa and more coming for Singapore and indeed I’m sure that won’t be the end of our developments.”

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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24 comments on “Marussia to use Williams KERS in 2013”

  1. I think Marussia have defiantely done what they set out to do this year: stop spinning their wheels and start going in the right direction. The decision not to use KERS this year was the right one – for all its gains, KERS comes with added complexities, and it would be very easy to get caught up in the problems of the device and overlook the underlying issues, which would have left them treading water.

    1. Certainly looks as if they are finally getting to really get going on building a car. Lets hope we will see some progress from hem in the future

    2. yes but they are a year late, they aren’t improving, they promised more than they are achieving, HRT has outdone them several times this year and they are still struggling with the 107% rule.

      1. @ukfanatic

        HRT has outdone them several times this year and they are still struggling with the 107% rule

        Only in qualifying. HRT have never beaten Marussia in the races. There has been the occasion when one HRT has beaten one of the Marussias – de la Rosa was 21st in Germany with Glock 22nd – but they have never beaten both, and since Karthikeyan has never finished in front of de la Rosa, he has never finished in front of a Marussia, either. Even when he finished 15th in Monaco, Glock was 14th (Pic retired).

        Beating HRT probably wasn’t Marussia’s priority this year. They need to get the car moving in the right direction, and they can do that without beating HRT. I’ve heard that they have a three-year plan in place so that they can fight for points at the inaugural Russian Grand Prix. That seems fairly realistic, given that it has taken Lotus/Caterham three years to start challenging the Toro Rossos (and Petrov was running in the points in Valencia before Ricciardo hit him). They’ll have two years’ experience as Virgin to fall back on as well.

        1. That’s what i was saying, I like Marussia, it’s just that in 2010 they were neck and neck with the current Caterham and then they never evolved on the time sheets, if Caterham has been disappointing, Marussias has been what? and HRT? You say it took 3 years still none of the teams expected to be as bad as they actually are, especially Caterham, which claimed several times to be capable of fighting for points, Mike Gascoyne sounds like a tape recorder and the only thing i see on his resumé are failures, with Jordan with Toyota and now Caterham, if anything he got famous because he got lucky cause his decisions have deemed this teams to failure, let’s make a lighter engine he said on Toyota, end result drivers complaining about the lack of speed, i’m sure that he doesn’t make all decisions, but if he is the director he is the one that takes the blame, and i’ll blame him for the failures of Jordan and Toyota.

  2. Will Charles Pic be with Marussia next year? What does it matter? Caterham haven’t achieved anything yet, and I doubt Marussia will either.

    1. @oblong_cheese No idea. He’s doing a decent job but so did D’Ambrosio. Maybe they will give one of the guys from Carlin GP2 team a go…if he brings enough cash.

      1. @andrewtanner – I’ve heard that Marussia are very happy with Pic. They really do need to keep their second driver around for more than one year, but Timo Glock is apparently upset with him after Pic supposedly blocked him in Germany.

        Glock hasn’t really accomplished anything with the team. Like Heikki Kovalainen, he was brought on to develop the car and push them up the grid. So far, he has failed to do that. This might be because of the Nick Wirth madness, but I woudn’t be surprised if Glock goes somewhere else in 2013, in which case I expect Chilton or Haryanto to get promoted.

        1. @andrewtanner Yeah, I don’t think Glock has had the best opportunity to shine. I don’t expect that Glock will have anywhere to go in F1 and 2013 will only really be their second year as a team with a bit more traditional focus and direction. If they can get lucky and beat HRT this season I reckon he will perk up a bit.

          1. @prisonermonkeys Tagged myself in that reply by accident ‘cos I’m a fool.

          2. @prisoner-monkeys …then failed to tag you properly! I give up.

        2. I agree. One day people praise Glock on the next, people don’t like Glock, in my opinion he was never F1 material and beating inexperienced teammates isn’t a feat, he was back and forward he was in then he was out and returned as an GP2 champion right? then what? He sometimes beat Trulli, in the end one of Toyotas problems was the driver line-up. nothing is that straight forward but if Heikki is beaten by Alonso and Hamilton that means he is slower than them and ends up in a bad team, if Heikki beats Trulli that means he is better than Trulli, if Trulli was better than Glock, where is Glock is he a 3rd tier driver or a 4th tier driver, where is De La Rosa and Karthikeyan?

  3. Good news! A little part of me thinks that this may be futile, given the ERS systems being introduced with the new engines in 2014 but nevertheless, I guess it would be easy for them to ignore KERS for another year and focus elsewhere.

    1. That was my thinking. However, if they get it right and manage to score just one or two points, it wont have been for nothing. It could be the difference between 11th and 10th.

    2. But the KERS is quite a major upgrade, I’m not sure they can (with their capabilities) find a couple of tenths somewhere else or at which prize … So yes KERS come with a risk but the advantage is quite substential and big enough to ignore for too long.
      Right decision to ignore it this year and concentrate to nail the car, quite complex and have a reliable basis and then add performance possibilities. It’s not because they have KERS available that they have to race it in the first few races. Try it on friday then make your choice for the week end.

  4. I really don’t understand how the smaller teams afford F1. With the huge expenses and difficulty to progress, it’s a wonder any new teams join the sport, let alone stay.

    1. Caterham have kept their noses above water by finishing 10th in the constructors in last couple of seasons. Where all the money is coming from for Marussia and HRT is a mystery – literally just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks there!

      1. Marussia have sponsorship backing from JCC, QNET, Lagardere, CSC & VPS along with the main stream sponsors every F1 team has (Pirelli, total).

        HRT have no sponsors on their car and rely on Karthikeyan’s money and television rights to keep themselves running.

        1. Apparently the 11th and 12th teams get around $10m of tv money. But Caterham for example are getting 30-40m. That huge gap is one thing i’d like to see changed for the next concorde, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. Bernie doesn’t care.

          1. That huge gap is one thing i’d like to see changed for the next concorde, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. Bernie doesn’t care.

            It’s designed to stop the phenomenon of start-and-park, where under-funded teams would show up, qualify for the race, then park the car after a lap because it is too expensive to keep the car going, collect a cheque at the end of the season and do it all over again the next year.

            Even if you could guarantee that the teams finishing in eleventh and twelfth at the end of the season would compete seriously for the year, awarding them money would never happen. And it’s not Bernie’s fault, either – the teams would never agree to it. The payments at the end of the year come from the television rights. Those rights are paid by broadcasters at a fixed rate for the duration of their contract. This means that there is only a finite amount of money to go around in the first place. If you start cutting the bottom two teams in, it means that everyone gets less money than they do now. The likes of Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull probably wouldn’t object, but the teams that come fifth, sixth and seventh would object, because the end-of-year payout forms a significant part of their operating budget for the next year. If more teams get money, everyone has to take a cut to make it happen.

            Now, you could make a case for putting up the cost of the television rights in the first place, but all you’re going to do then is lose broadcasters who can’t afford the new contracts.

  5. Good! Might be Williams gearbox either? also I wonder which team would like to have Pat Symonds.

  6. Coupled with the engines, KERS will only guarantee they qualify within the 107% rule next season.
    Of course, they have to be happy with their current engines, they don’t have the resources to get better.
    As Caterham has show, Fitting much betters engines is no guarantee of points, so why waist the extra cash.

    1. Waste too

  7. They are so far behind the eight ball that advances in the top teams will rule out any gains that Marussia hope to acheive. This team is on a pointless journey and it will remain a hopeless environment for all whose choose to drive for them. Sorry, sometimes the truth hurts.

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