Some interesting infos on Kers in that article:
Toyota to introduce KERS only in mid-2009 "We are working flat out on KERS, but our sincere view is that people underestimate some of the major challenges,"
"We will run a car in January with KERS in a monocoque not designed for it, which we could not race, but it will be a test platform - and our gut feeling is that the earliest (it will race) will be mid season. We don't know yet. We are still testing on rigs.
So it is not that we are not going to race it. Just our position is different from some other teams who believe it will be an instant in."
"Fundamentally we will have a car that will run KERS, but it will be very difficult to race. That is all I am prepared to say, and we would have to modify it to be able to race."
The dilemma about racing KERS at the start of the season is further complicated by the fact that next year's move to slick tyres means that teams ideally want as much weight as possible at the front of the car.
Williams co-owner Patrick Head believed that such an issue could force other teams to follow Toyota's lead and delay the introduction of the systems.
We've got now four grooves in the front tyres, it started with three, and we've got four grooves in the rear tyre," explained Head.
When you take those grooves out it increases the contact patch area more at the front in relative terms than it does at the back. That is quite likely to cause you to want to run quite forward weight distribution.
I'm not sure what it's like for other people, but for us, with pretty much all of our ballast taken up with a KERS that we can't really run more forward than the impact area for the side impact test, it's very difficult for us to achieve the weight distribution that we suspect we will need to make a successful car next year."
"You have got to remember that the KERS, when you analyse the potential, the difference it makes can be somewhere between 0.1s and 0.3s, perhaps at the maximum 0.35s per lap, putting aside whether it helps you overtake.
Having your weight distribution inappropriate for the tyres by more than one or two percent will probably make more difference than those one or two tenths of a second per lap."
Howett also expressed his disappointment that news of Toyota's plans for KERS had leaked out of the FOTA discussions in China.
"I do resent that people have mentioned that," he said.
"It was a genuine meeting of absolute confidence where everybody sincerely explained (their situation) - saying that if we allowed this concession on certain discussions then we want to freeze the monocoque. We said okay, this is our sincere position at the moment."
Max and his KERS is giving F1 teams a real headache... especially when you consider it is being used as leverage to spec the monocoque.
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