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.
