Williams is keeping its flywheel KERS on the backburner, even though it has committed to a battery-based system on this year's FW33.
When KERS was first introduced in 2009 Williams said it would buck the trend by storing power with a flywheel rather than batteries. However, due to problems with packaging the team never ran the system at a race weekend and this year, on KERS's return, has opted for batteries.
In the meantime a variant of Williams' flywheel concept has been developed for motor racing by Williams Hybrid Power (WHP) and was used on a Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid at the Nürburgring 24 Hours. Williams technical director Sam Michael said it will be considered again for next year's car.
"We did consider a flywheel for this car, it was very close but unfortunately the packaging stopped us doing that to start with," he said at the launch of the FW33's livery. "Obviously WHP works on flywheels in other industries, but we also haven't discounted introducing it on this car at some point. It would be very unlikely we'll do it in 2011, but it will definitely be on the cards again for 2012, flywheel versus battery."
For the upcoming season Michael is pinning his hopes on the Williams' tightly-packaged rear end, which includes a steeply-angled driveshaft and an incredibly low gearbox.
"The front of the chassis is fairly well fixed now," he said. "What we looked at was over the whole car and [asked] 'what can we do that's a differentiator'. Because everyone is going to have a similar chassis height, the barge board and front wing layouts are fairly similar between the cars - there is a lot of performance there [to be lost] if you get it wrong, but it's not going to differentiate you from anyone. The only thing that is really free is the rear end.
"So we've tried to get the rear end as tight and small as we can and have spent many months on the dyno. We've really had to tear up the piece of paper we had in the past on how you design a transmission and really be no-holds barred on anything. We said to ourselves in the design office, let's make sure when we drive out in February that nobody has gone tighter and lower than we have, we want to be the lowest."
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