I'd like to thank you all for taking the time to come and I'd like to talk a little bit about the future Formula One engine regulations. First of all, the regulations that have been published state very clearly that engines will be homologated for three years, in 2008, 2009 and 2010. There have been some discussions about whether the homologation should be relaxed to some degree, but in actual fact we've reached a situation where there are at least three and possibly more views on this.

Some teams think we should stick with completely homologated engines, with no changes at all. Some people like the so-called Maranello agreement and some would like a more liberal agreement than Maranello, but there is no consensus. Under those circumstances the 12 teams who have entered the championship from 2008 have done so under the regulations as published, so we intend to stick quite simply to the rules as they are, and as they were approved by the World Motorsport Council on March 22.

I would remind you that the reason for homologation was that we want to eliminate engine development costs where the major manufacturers are spending between 100 and 200 million euros per year. Indeed more than that in some cases – and that is quite clearly unsustainable when the outcome of all that expenditure is just to make the engines run 200-300rpm faster each year. It's not sustainable and can't continue.

For that reason we proposed the homologation and that will continue. I should point out that under the Maranello agreement, which is the slight relaxation, when the calculations were done the engines were still going to cost well over 15 million euros per year more than the completely static, homologated engine. On any count homologation seems a sensible thing to do. The engines are very good. They are running at 19,000rpm plus they are very reliable by any historic standards, and amazingly so when you consider they are all new this year. They are also, as I say, more than powerful enough, to the point that I think we've all been surprised by them.

So, the first point I wanted to make is that we will implement the homologation rule as published. That means we will be sealing a number of two-race engines – in fact we have already sealed some of them. We will be sealing more once they have done two races and those will be the spec engines. Each manufacturer will be required to supply us with a complete dossier on these engines so that we will know what the spec is.

That brings us to development and technology, what about them? What we wish to do, and at the moment it is only an idea rather than a regulation, 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. At that time one team was working on, I believe, a hydraulic system and another on an inertia system. And since then of course 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.