Investment of lottery money in research and technology has been hailed as a key factor in Great Britain's surge up the medals table in Beijing. Now The Times has discovered how this may have helped the Team GB rowers to their best Olympic medal haul.

Britain's rowers have been helped by technology pioneered with a company based on an industrial estate in Draycott, Derbyshire. EPM Technology have made a number of James Bond cars and its work on one specific section of the Team GB boat, the rigger, is believed to have saved a boat between half and three quarters of a second.

The rigger on a boat is the triangular section that extends from the side of the boat to hold the gate, the swivel in which the oar is held. Boat builders have always worked on the aerodynamism of their boats, but the British have taken this farther by studying the drag and wind resistance of the rigger and using special high-tech carbon-fibre materials to minimise it.

The riggers on some of the Britain boats were thus thinner than those on the other boats in the regatta and had lower air resistance. The cost of producing each of these specially pioneered riggers was around £4,000 - and that is to say nothing of the cost of the research that went into developing them.

Indeed, such was the cost of each rigger that GB Rowing used them on only four of its 12 boats. In total, 18 special riggers at a cost of around £72,000 were used.

“There is a point where I wouldn't agree to a certain amount of money being spent,” David Tanner, the performance director of GB Rowing, said. “But the way I see it, we should be looking at these kinds of things. There is a feeling of wanting to push every edge that we can. Even if it's one hundredth of a second, you should be looking for it.”

However, given the success of such technology, certain crews may be left wondering if they could have done better had they, too, been the beneficiaries of these high-tech riggers. The crews that were selected to use the new riggers were mainly the flagship boats, the men's four (that won a gold medal) and women's quad (silver), plus the lightweight men's four (fifth) and the men's pair, who did not make the final.

Quite what would have happened had £16,000 and four new riggers been spent on the women's double scull of Anna Bebington and Elise Laverick we can only imagine because they won bronze, but were less than a quarter of a second behind Germany and the winners, New Zealand. Likewise, the men's double of Stephen Rowbotham and Matt Wells, who won bronze but were only five hundredths of a second behind the silver-medal boat from Estonia.

Tanner said that it was not possible to define the exact speed gains of the new carbon-fibre rigger and that, owing to varying wind speeds and other such indefinables, it would not necessarily have been a case of a bunch of extra riggers turning two bronzes into a silver and a gold.

The race for better research and technology was the competition behind the competition in many Olympic sports in Beijing, particularly Britain's three most successful sports, rowing, cycling and sailing. Much of this work is kept top secret. For instance, British cycling officials in Beijing were furious to discover that their specially pioneered race suits had been copied with bizarre exactness by the New Zealand team and are keen to discover the source of the leak.

Technological advances in rowing are likewise a way of making those precious incremental gains. The Britain team at the Shunyi Rowing Park were relieved that the size of the boathouses there were such that the boats could be racked away without their advances being too open to prying eyes.

Some of the best money spent on the rowers may have been on the goggles that they sometimes wore in training that prevented them from seeing where they were going. These goggles came in at just under £5,000 a pair and blacked out the rowers' view of the river. Inside the visor screen, though, they could see a computer-generated screen that gave them precise information on the level of their performance.