A deep dive into a Formula 1 team's spreadsheet failings.
Last week an interesting story emerged from one of the world’s most expensive and high-tech sports. Williams Racing, the Oxfordshire-based nine-time Formula 1 constructors champion publicly admitted to using Microsoft Excel to manage their car's parts.
As many fans of the sport will know, the once great team has languished towards the rear of the grid with their last championship win in 1997, and last race win in 2012. The main reason - chronic underinvestment where other teams have continued to develop their processes.
In our work at Shoothill, we routinely move businesses away from the heavy utilisation of spreadsheets, onto bespoke solutions tailored for them.
Indeed, correlation doesn’t equal causation. So, whilst these disappointing results can’t be attributed to just using a spreadsheet when the competition doesn't - it can’t have helped.
Read on to find out how Williams was using a spreadsheet, how this hampered their team and what alternatives there are.
How was Williams Racing using spreadsheets?
Williams has long been battling to improve their team. Now under the stewardship of a new team principal James Vowles, a mastermind behind the success at Brawn GP and Mercedes-AMG. The team is looking to get back to the front of the grid and as a result, needs software to match their ambition.
The production of a Formula 1 car is a complicated task, most teams buy in their engine from a team like Ferrari or Mercedes, but the rest of the car – that’s all built in-house.
In an interview with The Race, Vowles discussed the digital transformation he was pursuing after finding the development of this season's car limited by the team’s infrastructure.
Vowles highlighted the team’s 20,000-line Excel document:
“The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update”.
Spreadsheet-based businesses become an administrative nightmare very quickly, with different lead times, staffing requirements and material consumption all needing manual management. For perspective, Williams’ front wing alone uses 400 separate parts. But just like in business- it's easy to end up like this by simply continuing as you've always done things.
Specifically for parts inventory management heading into the 2024 season, Mercedes-AMG partnered with SAP to optimize their supply chain and ensure adherence to budget limits with a modified version of their platform. So like in all industries, there’s a potential solution out there.
However, when an off-the-shelf product or SaaS provider doesn't do what your business or team need, a custom solution can be built by a team like Shoothill.
We couldn’t promise Williams a championship win with a custom software solution, but it would be one of the institutional changes that would lay the foundations for future success. However, to improve they are replacing this system with a software solution.
What are the consequences of using spreadsheets in F1?
The interview touched on the human cost of these poor systems, leaving it all on a few members of staff to get projects across the line – but often behind schedule.
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Also speaking with The Race, Pat Fry, William’s Chief Technical Officer said:
“If you go back to how we worked, whatever, 20 years ago, loads of bits would be late and someone will put their Superman underpants on over the outside of their trousers, rush round and save the day.
“We just need to be a little bit smarter about the way we go about things.”
With the sport of Formula 1, there’s a track record of failing teams using spreadsheets in their workflows. In 2017, Renault’s Infrastructure Manager publicly criticized the team’s 77,000-line spreadsheet used in place of an ERP (enterprise resource planning) application. At the time Renault was struggling having concluded the 2016 season in 9th place.
Undoubtedly, as an organisation grows and its projects become more complex - its systems need to grow to accommodate this in today's world. This applies beyond the Formula 1 Paddock into the world of business. Without investment in your systems, remaining competitive becomes harder and harder.
What alternatives to spreadsheets are there?
Software plays a key role in Formula 1 and over the past 20 years has been a key part of the sport’s success stories, as the motorsport like many other aspects of life has become increasingly digital. Be that teams using Siemen’s Xcelerator for car design, or RaceWatch for in-race strategy making, or even the hybrid engines now used in the cars.
The three most successful teams of the past decade are undoubtedly Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes-AMG. Each of these three teams has software and technology providers as major sponsors and partners. Red Bull with Oracle, Ferrari with Amazon Web Services and Mercedes both Siemens and Petronas.
There’s also a plethora of partnerships with chip manufacturers like AMD and Snapdragon that help keep these teams at the front of the grid with the right technology backing them up.
The exact work these partners do for each team is secretive, but it’s the same in all businesses – operational security is paramount. It can be safely assumed that those teams at the front of the field are doing something a little different to the rest of the back to get there.
Very few off-the-shelf parts are involved in Formula 1, and as a result all teams from a tech perspective need something a little more bespoke. Nearly every team and organisation attached to Formula 1 such as Pirelli or the FIA regularly advertise software developer and engineer positions, be that for the car itself or linking all these systems together to ensure success.
If this tale of spreadsheet-based inefficiency resonates with you or your business- contact the team at Shoothill. We're equipped to apply our software development expertise to your business, keeping you on the podium.
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