Atanatizante asked me to bring some clarity into the token/reliability upgrade application in practice; he also asked me to post it in this thead, so here you go:
Atanatizante wrote:Could you please enlighten us - in the Spain race thread - regarding token rules and stuff?
My knowledge is that once you put a token on a PU system this update works only for future hence unused PU, isn't it? And therefore it doesn't work on old/older PU, right?
Maybe it's better to explain very plain and simple how these token thing works, such as begin with the first one : this year they have only 4 engines allocated for 19 races, and so forth ...
A month or so ago, I did my research on the matter of tokens and reliability upgrades. Back then it was a study to know how bad the situation was far Renault. I molded it into an article:
http://www.f1technical.net/news/19976
You are correct to state that when you put on a token on a PU component (again, there are 6 PU components), the token can only apply on a future, "not used" allocation of said PU component. Not used means effectively "not started". So you can actually put the PU component, during an official race weekend, inside the car, take it out again and effectively it will not have been used yet. However, once you started it inside the car, it's a used component, locked into its specification.
(Specifically to note here is that Renault had developed upgrades throughout the winter, with those upgrades using up tokens. However, right before Australia they had developed those same upgrades further. If they applied those developments later on, it would cost them even more tokens since before Australia, no actual tokens was used up. Hence why they rushed those development without extensive testing, since they -correctly- reasoned it would save up tokens in the future.)
Remember, you can only use 4 allocations before receiving penalties. You can of course go beyond those 4 allocations and just pick up the penalties along the way. So for instance you can still apply updates on the 6th allocation of a particular PU component.
There's however one particular thing to consider:
And therefore it doesn't work on old/older PU, right?
You shouldn't be looking at the PU as one whole, but as the 6 components it is made out of. You have 4 (regulatory) allocations of each component. You are pretty much allowed to mix different allocations of the components through eachother. For instance take a look at Ricciardo. He'll be using his 4th allocation of the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) in Spain, but he'll probably still be working with his first ES (Energy Store, the battery), a component assumed that would neither require tokens, reliability upgrades or breaks down fast.
There's a catch though. In the above we assume that future allocations with token/reliability upgrades are backwards compatible, so we assume that for instance a future Turbo Charger (TC) with upgrades, fits on the ICE. However, if the change on the TC also require a change on the ICE, the new TC might not fit on the old ICE, and/or the old TC might not fit on the new ICE.
It really depends whether an upgrade is limited solely on a particular component without changing how it works together with the the other components.
Mind that while you are regulatory allowed to mix old and new allocations of different components, you are not allowed to take parts of components to replace the same parts of the same component of a different allocation. Say a fan breaks off of your TC and you want to replace that fan by one of an older TC. Well that's simply not allowed.
