In 2009 Formula One cars are going hybrid in the first stage of a programme to divert the huge research effort at the pinnacle of motor sport towards energy efficiency.

When a road car has to stop, at traffic lights for example, energy is lost. Then more fuel has to be used to get up to speed again. If we could store the energy lost when a car brakes and use it to accelerate the car again when the lights change, fuel would be saved.

This is the principle of the hybrid road car. Hybrid cars are very economical in congested areas because energy is used more than once. City vehicles such as buses and taxis can be transformed with hybrid technology, but at present the equipment to store the energy is heavy and needs a lot of space. The amount of energy the present generation of hybrids can store is also only a small proportion of the energy wasted when the car brakes. What is needed are energy-storage devices that are not only small and light but able to recover all the energy lost at present when braking.

All Formula One teams want more power: it is one of the ways to make their cars faster. Traditionally, this has been found by making an engine of limited capacity run at higher and higher speeds. This has recently been taken to extremes, with as many as seven leading car manufacturers each spending upwards of £150 million annually on engine development. The result has been engines that could run at an ear-splitting 20,000rpm — technical masterpieces but almost entirely irrelevant in the real world.

Since last year development of these engines has been frozen. Teams are no longer able to gain more power and a competitive advantage by running their engines faster. Extra power can be gained only by making better use of energy, in other words getting more useful work from the fuel burnt. An immediate example of this new approach is the revolutionary hybrid device that all leading Formula One teams will have in 2009.

Without some stimulus, novel technologies take years to evolve in the research departments of large car companies and their suppliers. For hybrid cars, that is about to change. This is because hybrid technology will give a Formula One team a performance advantage only if the storage device is very small and very light and capable of absorbing 80bhp when the car is braking. Anything approaching the size and weight of existing road-going systems would add so much weight and bulk to a Formula One car that the performance loss from having to carry it would be more than the gain from the extra power.

Most leading car companies are working on electrical systems that are an evolution of those in use at present. Some Formula One engineers are doing the same, but with much more extreme devices, including extraordinary new electric motors and novel battery/capacitor storage devices. Other teams are developing small flywheels running at very high speeds in a vacuum. Flywheels as energy storage devices have been used for many years, but are not being developed by the car industry. Developments in Formula One may change that.

By way of illustration, a Formula One device will have to have the potential to store all the energy lost when an ordinary car has to stop from 50mph in a few seconds and then re-use this energy to accelerate the car quickly back to almost 50mph without using any fuel. The entire package is likely to weigh less than 30kg.

Following on from the hybrid devices will be some very sophisticated technology to give more power in Formula One from the same amount of energy. Only one third of the energy for which the everyday motorist pays at the pump actually propels the car. The other two thirds is lost in its cooling system and exhaust. By recovering some of this lost energy, very significant economies become possible. This is an area in which Formula One is set to make a big contribution by speeding up the necessary research.

Research in a leading car company has a timescale of five or ten years, but a Formula One team knows that if it is not ready with new technology as soon as allowed by the rules, the team in the next garage will be and any deficiency will be exposed on live television and broadcast round the world. So there is a strong incentive to develop relevant technologies extremely quickly.

By bringing in rule changes that make these technologies the only means by which a power advantage can be obtained, we can ensure that the outstanding engineers and huge budgets available to Formula One will be deployed on energy recovery and re-use technologies that are directly relevant to the car industry’s efforts to reduce CO2 emissions as well as the average motorist’s fuel bill.

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