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URL: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/03/formula-1-chief-appalled-to-find-team-using-excel-to-manage-20000-car-parts/
Submission: On March 28 via manual from SG — Scanned from SG

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DARK MATTER STRIKES AGAIN —


FORMULA 1 CHIEF APPALLED TO FIND TEAM USING EXCEL TO MANAGE 20,000 CAR PARTS


WILLIAMS TEAM LEADER MAY ONLY BE SHOCKED BECAUSE HE HASN'T WORKED IT.

Kevin Purdy - 3/21/2024, 2:12 AM

Enlarge / A pit stop during the Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix in early March
evokes how the team's manager was feeling when looking at the Excel sheet that
managed the car's build components.
ALI HAIDER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

READER COMMENTS

205

There's a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he's eager to
shake things up. He's been saying that the team is far behind its competition in
technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.

Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical
officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team's systems for designing and
building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from
falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and
systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.

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The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a
joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to
update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those
parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts
were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from
manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your
organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The
Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered,
inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you
start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is,
the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that's exactly where
we are."

The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many.
Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to
physically search the team's factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority,
other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern
tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for
the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits
and breaking."

Williams' driver Alexander Albon drives during the qualifying session of the
Saudi Arabian Formula One Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Jeddah on
March 8, 2024.
Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images


THE DEVIL YOU KNOW STRIKES AGAIN

The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically
advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those
machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12–$16 million
each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters,
and it actually makes sense, if you've ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized
organization.

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FURTHER READING

Formula 1: A technical deep dive into building the world’s fastest cars
Then again, it's not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded
with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport
Formula One's Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long—more than
three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution
in 2023.

Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to
integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and
wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This
leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote,
though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system
that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email
and file sharing, at the time.)

One year prior to Anthony's excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the
benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP).
You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If
PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another,
their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the
systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of
data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576
rows of it.

Banks cited Tim Worstall's 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most
dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers
were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their
work, and it raised alarm.




FURTHER READING

We keep making the same mistakes with spreadsheets, despite bad consequences
But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in
recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an
accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely
undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the "dark matter" of large
organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of
larger sheets being likely to have a major error.

So, Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they're just a symptom of a
larger issue. Still, it's good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a
human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.


ARS VIDEO


HOW SCIENTISTS RESPOND TO SCIENCE DENIERS




READER COMMENTS

205
Kevin Purdy Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering a
variety of technology topics and reviewing products. He started his writing
career as a newspaper reporter, covering business, crime, and other topics. He
has written about technology and computing for more than 15 years.

Advertisement



PROMOTED COMMENTS

alexrdavies
In the same interview, Vowels says he changed the way the team classified their
parts in a way that increased the quantity tenfold:

“Our chassis went from a few hundred bits to a few thousand bits. That's just
one part of the car.”

Before that, the team were using Excel to track a sheet with 2,000 lines; which
it's perfectly capable of doing.

To me, this is a story about someone coming from a big company with big data
systems and asking the small company to put a similar quantity of data through
its simpler and different setup...

... then having to scramble because it turns out, your new employer's systems
weren't built for your old employer's working practices.

Still fascinating, mind! But the picture Vowles tries to paint that the old
systems were just rubbish before he arrived to change things, is a bit
one-sided.
March 20, 2024 at 6:23 pm



CHANNEL ARS TECHNICA

HOW FORZA'S RACING AI USES NEURAL NETWORKS TO EVOLVE

Today on War Stories, Ars Technica is joined by Dan Greenawalt, Creative
Director of the Forza franchise, who takes us through the colossal potential
(and many challenges) of utilizing deep neural networks to build sophisticated
racing AI. Beginning with the original Drivatar AI in Forza Motorsport for XBOX
in 2005, Greenawalt and his colleagues experimented with computer learning,
refining their methods from iteration to iteration. It was once the AI system
was unshackled from local hard drives and placed online in Forza Motorsport 5,
however, that the floodgates truly opened. As the AI rapidly evolved, producing
unexpected new behaviors, the Forza team quickly learned how challenging it
would be to wield this two-edged sword in creating realistic opponents.

 * HOW FORZA'S RACING AI USES NEURAL NETWORKS TO EVOLVE

 * THE SUPERCHARGED FERRARI 488 GTB | ARS TECHNICA

 * ASTON MARTIN'S DB11 V12

 * FAST, FUN, AND FREAKY: A REVIEW OF THE ALFA ROMEO STELVIO

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