I think it was Christian Horner said last week that they'd made a step forward with the system and were hoping to run it this weekend. It's a bit of a blow for the other teams that by far the fastest car on the grid is getting a significant boost in pace so early in the season. We'll see though, if the cooling issue is going to be a problem anywhere it will be in the searing heat of Sepang. It's going to be a real baptism of fire for the system.
Hoping for a team to fail or have issues isn't a good approach from the other teams. I hope they aren't giving up already. I wonder how RB have made a step forward given they can't have tested it on their car yet? KERS is known to increase rear tyre ware, something we're told RBR suffered with in Oz, could be that including KERS adds a pitstop to their race. An achilles heel perhaps?
I really hope, for the sake of competition, the Red Bull runs KERS and it messes up their balance. That, or rain ends their dominance. I really don't want to see a Red Bull dominate at Malaysia, and the RB car is too easy to drive. It's been a while since Vettel struggled to handle the car.
With the tyre wear thing, maybe it (I know this sounds odd), irrelevant? If they, for example, knew that 3 stops wouldn't be enough to make the last set of tyres last, and would need a fourth stop anyway, the tyre wear may not be more detrimental than KERS is beneficial?
Possibly, but it would always be nice to have a choice on the number of stops. Also with rain at somepoint pretty much certain being able to make your tyres last a few laps longer may be a race winner.
KERS is reported to be worth 3-5 tenths a lap. Malaysia is a 56 lap race which means the KERS benefit is about 17-28 seconds, probably tending to the latter on a track like Sepang. Even if it does result in an extra stop, all it will really do is cancel itself out so there's nothing really to lose by having it on the car. It's very unlikely to be the deciding factor between a three and four stop strategy anyway.
KERS will give them an extra 3-5 tenths. But it will also increase tyre wear and seeing how their tyre wear was not too great compared to McLaren in Australia, it will be very close, unless it rains then its a lottery.
This very much depends upon a number of other conflicting factors. That is the reason they have chosen to run without it before. However, you are right that if they anticipate no difference in the number of pit stops, extra tyre wear due to KERS is negated. By far the greatest difficulty is the effect KERS has upon a car's balance, since it restricts the use of ballast (which is moved to help overcome balance problems).
