Honda surprised by Renault token spend

Honda's head of F1 project Yusuke Hasegawa is surprised by how few tokens Renault spent on its latest power unit upgrade.

Renault introduced its B-spec power unit in Monaco, with Daniel Ricciardo going on to take pole position for Red Bull. Remi Taffin said the update "includes significant modifications to the combustion system" and delivers an improvement of around 0.5s per lap, with Renault spending just three development tokens on the new power unit.

With Honda pondering its first token spend of the season ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, when asked if Renault's upgrade shows what is possible without spending a significant amount of tokens, Hasegawa replied: “Right, this is very surprising.

"I wonder, if their update is as rumoured - that they are changing the combustion system - I don’t think they can do it with just three tokens. So I don’t know how they did that."

Asked if he was surprised by the performance of the upgrade in Monaco, Hasegawa replied: “Yeah.

"Of course I am judging it with some rumours so I don’t see the actual number."

Renault itself is hoping to see the "full benefit" of its power unit upgrade at this weekend's Canadian Grand Prix, which is a more power sensitive track compared to Monaco.

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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.