Max Mosley has admitted that as part of his vision for the future, he is still looking at technology that could make use of energy normally wasted, and in particular regenerative braking, whereby the heat generated when a driver brakes is stored in a battery, then subsequently used to produce addition accelerating power, bypassing the 'conventional powerplant.

"At the moment it is an idea rather than a regulation," said the Englishman at Silverstone today. "And it need not be a regulation until the end of 2006 in order to be introduced in 2009, is to bring into Formula One a technology that two teams were working on in the mid-1990s, but which we prohibited at the time on the grounds of costs and safety, primarily safety.

"That was energy storage devices," he continued. "At that time one team was working on, I believe, a hydraulic system and another on an inertia system. And since then there have been a number of electrical systems for storing energy.

"What it comes down to is this. In the next 30-50 years it is absolutely certain that every vehicle on the public road will be fitted with a device that will enable it to recover all the energy released when the brakes are applied and store it and use it again to drive and accelerate the vehicle.

"At the moment all the braking energy is dissipated through heat as is all the energy when you lift off and the car is simply driving the engine. The heat from that, of course, goes out through the cooling system. The only exception to that is when some of the energy is recovered in hybrid systems, but very little, and it is stored in a battery at a very low rate. One shouldn't confuse what I'm about to say with hybrid systems. It is a completely different basic technology and will be part of a more complex system eventually on road cars.

"What we're talking about is really something quite simple," he continued, "a simple principle, but I emphasise that this is not yet proposed as a regulation. We want to sit and talk to the teams and manufacturers about it to find the best solution. What we have in mind is this: that every car can be fitted with equipment, which must weigh no more than 20 kilos and will store energy when the car brakes and enable the energy to be used when the car accelerates again. The technology we would like in that 20-kilo piece of equipment will be completely free, so that people can choose whether they want a hydraulic, inertia or electrical system, or some other technology or branch of those technologies.

"Compared for example with the suggestion of a push-to-pass button on an F1 engine as they are at the moment, if you allowed 1,000rpm for push-to-pass it would give about 40bhp for however long you allow the 20,000rpm.

"We're talking about 60bhp for nine seconds. We believe that when fully developed this system will enable a car to have about 900 kiloJoules, enough for about 120bhp for about 10 seconds. To put that in perspective, 900kJ is a two-ton road car stopping from 108km/h and going all the way back up to 108km/h again without using any petrol.

"This is quite clearly something that is and will be developed for the road and all the major manufacturers are working on different systems at this time. By allowing it in F1 we will be accelerating its introduction. We'd like to do that for 2009 but must sort out the detail of the regulation with the teams and manufacturers. This will be a technology that everyone can understand, the public can understand and it will be directly relevant to road cars and a technology for the future of road cars."

Asked if he was suggesting 'twin' engined F1 cars, with a combustion engine and an electrical engine, Mosley replied: "This would be energy that is entirely recovered under braking, even to the extent that we'd be quite happy for them to put the device at the front of the car and take the energy from the front wheels.

"All you would do is store the energy and that would be regulated by the ECU, then the driver would release the energy by pressing a button. The principle is simple but the device would be complex."