Formula One is a sitting duck for the environmentalist lobby and the sport knows it. No surprise, then, that administrators of the world’s most prestigious motor-racing championship are moving to preempt the inevitable backlash, as Honda are doing with their new “green” livery.

Consider the charge sheet. Formula One features some of the world’s most petrol-hungry machines rampaging around racetracks at 17 or 18 venues around the globe, as far apart as Melbourne, Indianapolis and São Paulo. The sport is run off a massive logistics budget, with 11 teams flying hundreds of tonnes of equipment and personnel all over the world and to places that invariably are clogged up with the merchandise Formula One promotes – cars.

Lots of people make plenty of money out of it and millions derive great enjoyment from it – two more reasons why Formula One’s regulators are determined to introduce reforms to make it more environmentally friendly.

Leading the move for change is Max Mosley, the president of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), motor racing’s governing body, who is overseeing a programme of technical innovation that will come into force over the next five years.

The goal is for Formula One to pioneer technologies that can be transferred to the cars we all drive in our daily lives. A freeze on engine development is in place; by 2009, Formula One cars will be required to recapture and reuse heat derived from braking and, by 2010, the cars will recover and reuse heat from their engines.

In the long run, the aim is for Formula One cars to use smaller, turbo-charged power units. In the meantime, the sport claims that it has achieved carbon-neutral status through the purchase by the FIA since 1997 of carbon credits in a tree-planting and forestry management scheme in Mexico.

Mosley said that the sport had to move away from being labelled a dinosaur. “The tide of world opinion has just turned regarding global warming,” he said. “With the changes we have made, we have caught the tide. If we had missed it, F1 could have become irrelevant.”