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My academic background is in the field of renewable energy so it was quite a long way away from Formula One™. When I was finishing my thesis at Sydney University in Australia I got to know Adam Parr, Williams F1's current Chief Executive Officer, and we had a number of discussions about the future of renewable energy and how technology could play a role in transforming large scale commercial activities like mining.

As a result of those conversations I was offered the chance to join the Williams F1 team to look at taking some of the very innovative technologies that have been developed in Formula One™ out of the motor sport realm and deploying them in a wider context.

I'm lucky because within my role I straddle both the commercial and technological areas so as well as supporting on securing and developing sponsorship investments, I also look at business development opportunities where technology we have developed could be deployed into a range of industries.

My interest in the development of technology, and renewable energy in particular, is rooted in the entire cycle: how you understand the market, what are the policy drivers and what are the economic implications? To do that you really need experience in a broad range of disciplines.

F1™ is the most competitive sport that exists — the passion and ferocity of some of the engineers that work here is phenomenal and certainly having the extreme visibility of 200 million people on a Sunday potentially witnessing a miscalculation is extremely motivating.

I think the perception is completely different from the reality when it comes to the environmental impact of Formula One™. It's really all about efficiency: any extra performance you can gain from one millilitre of fuel will translate into less weight to carry round the track. Our cars running on track are a very small fraction of our overall carbon footprint — as our recent participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project highlights. Our positive contribution is what we do with our technology.

Energy storage is one of the key enabling technologies for the transition to an economy that isn't wholly dependent on fossil fuels. Whether it's for electric vehicles, building management systems or stabilising renewable energy grids — all of that is going to require energy storage.

My interest in the technology that Williams Hybrid Power is developing is that it provides very unique characteristics compared with other energy storage options like chemical batteries or ultra capacitors. There's no single solution for everything but each one will possess characteristics that make them better suited for some applications. With flywheels they can supply energy at very high power and have an incredibly long cycle life and can be easily recycled.

For example if a flywheel is connected to a wind turbine it can be used to stabilize that output so you get much smoother, cleaner electricity coming out of the other side which consequently is a lot more valuable. If you were to use a chemical battery for the same purpose, where it is continually being charged and discharged, it would need to be disposed of within a year. This is obviously not cost effective and also has a damaging impact on the environment.

With the work we're doing in Williams Hybrid Power we have a continual need to explore various technologies in academic literature and also look at patents. Given our existing sponsorship relationship with Thomson Reuters, it became apparent that they have a number of compelling products to assist us with our work.

Thomson Innovation is a very powerful tool that allows us to check up on new technologies we're interested in. Previously there wasn't consistency in our level of analysis yet now we are enabled to perform a thorough investigation of relevant intellectual property or academic literature on almost any subject we work on. The ability to do that easily and quickly is what allows us to do our work in the first place and having that thorough background really is very valuable to us.