The teams met in Sepang yesterday to discuss ways of improving the show, and one of the proposals put forward is that KERS be reintroduced in an attempt to aid overtaking. However, not all the teams are in agreement.

The controversial device was introduced for 2009, both as a means of aiding overtaking and also as part of the sport's desire to be seen as environmentally aware.

However, right from the outset there were problems, with only a few teams adopting the system - developed at tremendous cost - and even then, only for certain races.

Eventually, the teams decided not to continue with KERS this season, mainly due to the costs involved, but also due to the fact that while still written into the regulations its use was not mandatory.

However, in the wake of the mauling F1 received in the wake of the Bahrain Grand Prix, the sport is involved in some serious soul searching in its attempts to silence the critics and improve the show.

With the lack of overtaking in Bahrain, and in the latter stages of the Australian Grand Prix, the team bosses have discussed the possibility of reintroducing KERS, though opinion is divided.

"McLaren support the idea of KERS in F1 and we'd love to have it," said Martin Whitmarsh, his Woking team one of the few to persist with the device for much of 2009. "What we have to do is look at the bigger picture as F1 has to be sustainable for a minimum of 10 teams and if we are to reintroduce KERS we have to decide the speed which we reintroduce it and make sure it's affordable.

"Last year was interesting because some teams had KERS and others didn't," he continued, "maybe in the future KERS should be one of those sporting opportunities i.e. have a number of KERS deployments (per lap) that help overtaking."

However, Mercedes team boss Ross Brawn is not in total agreement. "We acknowledge that KERS will have a part to play in future technologies," he said, according to the BBC. "We think the (power) gains available last year were not significant enough and that we should look at KERS in the future with that in mind. We would prefer to look at something that is planned and integrated with the new power-train in 2013."

"That doesn't mean to say that KERS can only come in 2013," he added. "Maybe it can be anticipated, but if we do a system now and another in 2013 it's a shame. The systems we have now, the advantage they offer, is probably not enough and we need to look at systems that are substantial enough to help the sporting side of racing.

"If we had a push-to-pass button that you could only use a certain amount of times then we would have something quite exciting. So I think KERS has a future but we have to be careful not to rush back to what we had last year which we all agreed was not perhaps a huge success."

With KERS thought to have cost the teams over a £1bn to develop (in total) such development expenditure would be totally outside the budgets of the new entrants, therefore there is talk of a standard KERS unit being introduced.