Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRenault

F1 'should calm down about tokens' - Renault

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Renault's chief technical officer Rob White says too much emphasis is being placed on the tokens available to power unit manufacturers.

A loophole in the technical regulations forced the FIA to allow in-season development of power units via a token system, with each manufacturer limited as to how many tokens they can spend in a calendar year. The number of tokens available to each manufacturer was announced ahead of the opening race of the season, with Mercedes having seven, Honda nine, Ferrari ten and Renault 12.

While Ferrari and Honda have both used tokens already this season, Renault has yet to use any despite struggling for both performance and reliability in 2015. However, White says there is too much focus on token usage.

"I think tokens have taken on a bit of a life of their own and maybe we should calm down about tokens a bit," White said. "We clearly have tokens in hand and tokens in hand partly because we reassessed our options before the season to take account of the late-breaking news that the rules interpretation would be different to how it was expected. So ... tokens not spent thus far because we had to divert our attention to other matters.

"We had an obvious big reliability moment that required our full attention. We knew we were in bother right from the start and we knew that the management of the sporting penalties would be an issue for us right from the start of the season. Now we’ve got to make all that come together with all the performance upgrades that are now back on course but will of course arrive later than we had originally planned as a direct consequence of having to deal with the reliability matters."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.