Vasselon expects no KERS to pay off

Although Toyota are continuing to develop their KERS and could introduce the unit at any stage during the season, Vasselon is satisfied that the team have made the right decision by not kicking off the year equipped with the regenerative energy system.

"We took this decision being convinced that it would be an advantage," Vasselon told autosport.com. "It's not because we are late with the programme that we are not going to run it at the beginning of the season.

"We took into account the performance of the whole package. When you have KERS on the car you have almost no freedom left in terms of centre of gravity.

"It's not only the boost you get for a couple of seconds, you have to take into account the effect on the whole car. That's why we felt we needed some additional time to know whether there will be a net benefit."

Vasselon added that Toyota are continuing to work on developing their KERS system, and that they could have run with it from the start of the year had they chosen to do so.

"Our KERS system is running on the test bench, and it is working reasonably well," said Vasselon.

"It would have been possible to run KERS, but we feel that the general development of the system doesn't guarantee it will bring performance immediately."

Vasselon has also described the design process for the TF109 as significantly more intense because of the need to adapt to new aerodynamic regulations.

"It had to be a more intense process and we started as soon as we had enough information about the regulations," Vasselon told autosport.com. "We started at the end of 2007, which is four or five months earlier than normal.

"We have spent the complete 2008 season working on two cars at the same time when normally we have a progressive shift of resources from one car to the other, so it has been a totally different schedule.

"It is probably a much bigger change than the 1998 [narrow track] regulations because this one affected the two major performance drivers in F1 - aerodynamics and tyres. So it means we have to relearn all the groupings between these two items which are changing. From a technical point of view it's an extremely deep challenge and extremely complex to manage."