PETROL prices are creeping up again. From under 90p a few months ago they have sneaked back up to more than £1 a litre – or nearly £5 a gallon for the grown-ups among us.

So the boy racers charging round Crook Market Place the other night must have no brains but plenty of money to burn, as they accelerated fiercely then slammed on the brakes for a tyre-burning stop.

Presumably it was meant to impress someone, though quite who it was hard to see. But they might just as well have scattered five pound notes to the air, which would at least have been quieter.

For that extravagant driving is an easy way to waste a lot of money. It can add nearly a third to your fuel bill. Every extra ten miles of speed an hour uses about 4p a mile more in petrol.

The cheapest way to save money on fuel, of course, is not to use your car so much. Certainly not in doing show-off circuits of town centres.

But many of us have slid into the habit of using the car for journeys of a mile or less, when it is often easier, cheaper and certainly healthier, to walk.

Other fuel-saving tips include:

■ Turn off the air con – it can add ten per cent to your fuel bill

■ Don’t carry loads of stuff with you – extra weight means extra fuel

■ Don’t sit outside shops or in traffic jams with the engine running.

That pollutes the atmosphere and costs you money Best of all, you could become a hypermiler.

These are people who’ve taken fuel economy to an art form, by perfecting various techniques – mostly just an extension of common sense – that keeps fuel use down. In America this year, hypermilers took a new Ford Fusion hybrid and managed 1,445 miles on one tank full of petrol.

Hypermilers can clearly become obsessive, but there are plenty of tips and ideas for the rest of us. Check them out on hypermiler.co.uk.

Failing that, the least we can do is not pay over the odds for fuel in the first place.

Driving round looking for cheap petrol is a total waste of time, money and effort as you use more money hunting down cheap fuel than you actually save. But a useful website is petrolprices.com.

Once you’ve registered – free – you simply type in your postcode and it will give you the cheapest prices in any area. Very useful if you’re travelling around and can easily take advantage of cheaper fuel.

We tried it a few days ago and discovered that prices of unleaded petrol within 20 miles of Darlington ranged from 100.9p to 110.9p and it gave us the ten cheapest – all at under £1.02.

Diesel within ten miles of Bishop Auckland ranged from 100.9 to 107.9p. And as many of the more expensive garages were less than a mile from the cheapest, a small change in route could be worth the effort.

Warning – the site isn’t very good at place names (it thought Bishop was somewhere between Hexham and Corbridge) but is much more clued-up if you use postcodes.

But don’t tell the boy racers of Crook. The sooner they run out of petrol, the better.