Great post from over at autosport from TC3000
http://forums.autosport.com/topic/19828 ... try7165478
you can find the "weight" (how many token a change "cost") in the table at the end of the technical reglement.
http://www.fia.com/R...ulltext=&page=2
What Honda (and any other manufacturer) needs to weight up, is what is the wise/smart/best way to spend their tokens.
This needs to take two aspects into account - IMHO. First, you need to be sure, that what you do brings performance and is "scalable"/future proof (I will explain what I mean with this later).
Because you can do "reliability" upgrades later/any time. Therefore it's o.k. to be "bold" (at least from a technical pov - let's ignore for a moment any "image" constrains, like that your board doesn't want to see his engines blowing up spectaculary in front of a multi-million viewer TV audience (think Renault or Pirelli's tyre dramas -> bad from a PR pov), because you can "get this fixed later on", but you have to make sure, that you chose the "right development path" long term wise, even if this may causes you some short term pain/headaches.
But you also have to "put your chips down" (use your tokens) at one point, because they don't carry over.
If you don't spend them this year, you can't spend them in the future.
Now, their is a second aspect to this.
It's not just, that you "lose" your tokens (have less and less to spend in the coming years), there are also more and more areas of the engine frozen from year to year. This is the point, where you need to be smart/ try to anticipate the future.
You may go with a certain design, and then as you move forward (increase power etc.) you may will find, that the solution you have chosen,while looking o.k. back at the moment you went with it, now proves to be a limitation/handicap, but unfortunately you cant change it any longer, even if you still have tokens, because it has become "frozen".
For an example look at the table in the second position lower crank case "All dimensions including Cylinder bore position relative to legality volume,water core.", if you want to change this, it cost 3 tokens, but it get's frozen next year.
So if you find in 2018 (let's assume for now, that there is no major change in the general direction of the PU regs), that your solution is "suboptimal" you are "stuck" with this choice.
You will see, that other areas like combustion camber design and MGU-H remain open until 2018+.
Therefore, Honda needs to find a balance and needs to make sure, that their base layout is "scaleable"/future proof, and that they have the basics covered. If this is the case, they will have to allocate the remaining tokens where they see the "best bang for their bucks" performance wise. It may causes some issues/headaches in the short/medium term in terms of reliability, but on this aspect, they can still work later on.
I feel/think, that they still will weight up their options, and explorer different development paths, then they will most likely track test some PU's in Austria (2nd test), to verify on the track, what their simulations / test bed results "promised", and then go with the "best" /most promising solution for the second half of the seasons.
They may chose to keep 2-3 tokens "up their sleeve" if they "have a change of heart" or see/find that they need to change something.
I would expect (but I could be wrong), that they will "ramp up their game" in the second half of the season (past Austria).
Then we may see, more agressive jumps/steps in performance (on the PU side), but maybe will have to also live with a blown-up engine or two in the process.
No Pain - No Gain.
It will be interesting to see, which route Honda takes (do they stick with their current turbo/compressor layout - or was it just a "stop gap solution", until, they get a Mercedes style system up and running reliable).
And if this (their current layout) proves to be "the way to go" for the long term, or if they will fail to get their philosophy working on a practical level (winning races/championships).
Many concepts look "good"/promissing on a conceptual level - I think McLaren has their fair share of expirience with this too - Octopuse exhaust, L-shaped side pods, rear "blockers" etc.
I'm sure it all looked good in a simulation, and they had sound reasons to go with it, nevertheless it didn't seem to quite work out in practise, it didn't became a "game changer".
But to be fair one should remember, that they had good concepts too, which carried over, and became "en vouge" - like the F-duct and theirJ-damper (inerter) developments.
