Sutil backs Force India's KERS delay

Adrian Sutil has backed his Force India team's decision not to use the kinetic energy recovery system in the early rounds, despite partner McLaren-Mercedes' good progress with it

McLaren driver Heikki Kovalainen said this week that he felt his team's KERS was ready to race from the Melbourne season-opener, but although Force India will use the same system as part of their McLaren deal, they did not test it at Jerez and will start 2009 without it.

Sutil expects most of the field to be in the same position as his squad, and believes it is better to wait until the team are fully comfortable with KERS before using it in a race.

"We won't be using it for the first races, so we didn't test it in Jerez - we just concentrated on the main things," he said.

"It's not a real disadvantage to do the first races without it as we can see some of the other teams have had issues. At least you know what you have and you just run without KERS. There could be some reliability issues if you don't fully understand it and then run it."

He believes the team need to prioritise reliability at first so that they can capitalise on other teams' problems, especially with more teething troubles anticipated given the massive rule changes.

"Reliability is very important at the beginning, as we saw last year," said Sutil.

"There were a couple of chances that we missed because of reliability problems, especially the first race in Melbourne. There were lots of incidents, and also this year I think there's a possibility for quite a chaotic race.