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Formula 1 | Project Management | IT Strategy | Technical Debt | Williams
A F1 Car Built With Excel?!?
The impact of technical debt on performance: in business, in innovation… in sports
It’s easy to laugh about a F1 car being built on the basis of an Excel sheet, but the real issue is not the tool.
At heart, the issue is the deferred resolution of technical debt, going hand in hand with a shift in organizational culture.
The goal of team Williams for 2024 was to overcome performance weaknesses after several seasons with disappointing results. Central to their strategy was the introduction of a new chassis, which would increase the already staggering count of parts required to construct a Formula 1 car, numbering in the tens of thousands.
“Take a front wing,” says Vowles. “A front wing is about 400 different bits. And when you say I would like one front wing, what you need to kick off is the metallic bits and the carbon bits that make up that single front wing.
The process to assemble such a car must keep many factors into consideration: the time to fabricate parts, their cost, the time it takes to inspect and validate them, and so on.
This information was simply missing in the enormous Excel table they used for parts management, making any form of efficient planning impossible. For years, this has caused inefficiencies like people chasing information in non-structured ways: people frantically exchanging emails, sometimes even physically looking around the factory for parts.
…but a better ERP won’t make them faster, will it?
Still wondering how tangible the impact on a racecar’s performance?
Consider the following:
- ability to plan the replacement of metal parts with carbon to reduce the weight of the car;
- correct priorities in the delivery of different parts, to maximize the impact of the time spent in the wind tunnel;
- inefficient processes leaving less time for final tests, reducing the opportunities for optimizations;
- staff pushed to the…
