"Formula 1 helped make Tesla technology possible"

Williams chief technical officer Paddy Lowe has explained how F1 has made road car technology as found in Tesla's possible, as the sport started breaking ground in hybrid technology over a decade ago.

Hybrid power was first introduced in F1 in 2009 in the form of KERS. KERS was a way of storing the kinetic energy created by braking and using that energy during acceleration. Lowe explained how the system came to be.

“If you look at lithium-ion batteries, when we did KERS for 2009, when we started that in 2007 there was no way it was going to be an electrical solution," he told RaceFans.

"It wasn’t even in the game. It was going to be flywheel.

“The thing was power density at the time, that was the limit, not energy from the battery. And we delivered power density 100 times what had been expected. And that’s, in my view, the reason why nowadays we have Teslas. These cars that are out on the road need power density from the battery and that came from Formula 1.”

The F1's importance in developing new technology for road cars has come hand-in-hand with the rise of each team's budget, Lowe thinks, as things have become way more professional and technical from when he first started a few decades ago.

“The teams are more professional than they ever were, they’re better funded. Whilst we complain about always [being] short of money, they’ve been saying for 30 years or more.

“There are issues with the distribution which we all know. The balance of funding across the grid is the big issue. But in general within that every team, even the most poorly-funded team, is very well-funded compared to how they were in the past.

“That is translated into the most fantastic engineering professionally applied like it never was before. So the sport keeps growing commercially and it keeps growing technically.”