Toro Rosso won't rush KERS introduction

The Faenza-based team became the last to unveil their 2009 challenger at the Circuit de Catalunya on Monday, following a shakedown at Adria in Italy last week.

And although the outfit say their early impressions of the STR4 are positive, team chiefs Giorgio Ascanelli and Franz Tost have confirmed that they will start the season without KERS.

"I would say [you] can exclude it for Melbourne," said Ascanelli. "It seems very unlikely. China could be a discussion."

Tost said that the team felt it would be better to focus on other areas of the car first before worrying about KERS.

"To be honest, I don't think that we will go out in Melbourne with KERS, because we have to do things step-by-step now," he said. "And the first step is to learn the car, what is the car doing, have we set up the car in the proper way, and to find reliability. Then after we have done those steps we will be thinking about KERS."

Tost has added that the weight handicap of running KERS has led to serious question marks about the benefits of using the technology.

"The KERS system, I think, will become quite an interesting topic because the system itself is quite heavy, and it has a massive influence on the weight distribution in the car," he said.

"You for sure have an advantage after the start of the system on long straights like Bahrain or here in Barcelona, but there is also a question of what is the penalty for the tyres because you have a lot of weight on the back and it could be that the tyre degradation is quite high.

"That means that the advantage that you got for the six seconds out on the long straight is being penalised by higher tyre degradation. So it's a compromise. I think from team to team it is different as to whether it is an advantage to go out with the KERS system or not."