Formula 1 chief retires "impossible to navigate" Excel spreadsheet used to manage car...

[Shawn Knight]

WTF?! When James Vowles took over as team principal for the Williams F1 crew in early 2023, he knew they lagged behind the competition in several key areas. Pat Fry joined the team later that year as chief technical officer, and the two quickly determined that Williams' use of Microsoft Excel to manage its car build workbook was a problem.

As Ars Technica highlights, the colossal Excel file tracked roughly 20,000 individual race car parts. Vowles described it as impossible to navigate and impossible to update, further noting that it was "a joke."

Adding to the complexity was the multiple states that each component could be in – ordered, backordered, inspected, or returned, for example. Vowles said the intricacies often meant humans had to work out the details.

"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," he said.

Over the winter, Williams migrated the Excel spreadsheet to a new digital system while simultaneously upgrading the car's "technology base." It was a "viciously expensive" endeavor, Fry said, and one that Vowles said pushed the entire team to their absolute limits.

As overwhelming as the situation sounds, Excel may very well be the right tool for the job. The problem, then, would lie in the structure and foundation of the file. If it wasn't set up properly from the beginning for maximum efficiency, you cannot be surprised when it comes up short at scale.

Rather than spend a fortune on migrating to an entirely new system, it is at least plausible that Williams could have instead hired an Excel expert to reconstruct the file or build a new spreadsheet from scratch. Then again, this is a major F1 organization that we're talking about, so you have to think they explored every possible avenue before deciding to ditch Excel in favor of whatever new system they are using now.

As The Race notes, it could take some time for the team's changes to translate to the track. After two races, Williams is one point behind where it was a year.

Image credit: Mika Baumeister

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/102353-formula-1-chief-retires-impossible-navigate-excel-spreadsheet.html

 

[RandomWAN]

Major auto manufacturer's engineering teams should take note. You'd be suprised how many of them are using Excel and macros as part of their core engineering documentation/software.

 

[Dr Roboto]

Sure, you could have update the Excel spreadsheet, but that does not mean it is the best choice. I have used Excel since it first existed (yes I am getting old). In my experience it is way to error prone for anything of scale. All it takes is one mistake in a cell, and everything is off and trying to find it is really hard sometimes. I couldn't imagine tracking 20,000 parts in it.

That is why they invented databases: for large scale data management. They can be access programmatically with customer UI for part entry, status update, etc. Sure, there are places for mistake when writing code, but those can be debugged much easier. I would assume that is why they just bit the bullet and converted to some type of database with enterprise support.

 

[BogdanR]

This reminds me an old NYT article about the war in Iraq:
"We have met the enemy and it is Powerpoint"

 

[VariableSpike]

Classic case of a company bodging Excel into acting like a database, an immediate crime for anyone who works with data, because it causes messes like this - side note related to this, if any data role asks you to work with VBA's or mrntions Excel too much, avoid, or you get saddled with fixing or even "maintaining" lovely messes like this....

 

[brucek]

Excel is fine for presenting the finished report.

 

[Bobbydpue]

Why is this a story?

 

[Che Cazzo]

In the late 1990s I worked for a software company (who produced very high end prototyping software written in C++).

Guess what they were using to track 1000s of their clients' purchases, software versions, correspondence, etc? Word for Windows......ugh!!!! One huge Word document!!

I was the admin for their state of the art CRM system which was perfect for their sales dept to track potential sales (and nothing else); but the owners vehemently refused to use it instead of Word as a customer database!

 

[JuanDegr]

The article suggests, the data growth is the problem. 20.000 data points, even multiplied with four states is not big data. Not even nearly. This still is spreadsheet terrain unless you ask a software vendor. Chances are, the spreadsheet was not built from scratch for the job and/or people with legacy knowledge left the company. Some managers and consultants are always fast in condemning Excel, when all what they are is being just alien to it in the first place. They tell you, it is prone to errors and you need to invest. But human induced error will be at place in any system. Ask any data migration engineer or project lead if you believe sql and nosql databases are easy to navigate or migrate by design (they can be in theory, of course). So mostly it's not thr software, it's the human behind the keyboard. 20 years of BI, so I had my share of those stories.

 

[bluetooth fairy]

The problem was James himself who came from top-tier team, Mercedes. They could spent money on everything they wanted, because they dominated this sport from the 2014th.

But I believe this story has been leaked by somebody. It should have been kept inside the Williams F1 team otherwise.

 

[Jme Kerul]

The article suggests, the data growth is the problem. 20.000 data points, even multiplied with four states is not big data. Not even nearly. This still is spreadsheet terrain unless you ask a software vendor. Chances are, the spreadsheet was not built from scratch for the job and/or people with legacy knowledge left the company. Some managers and consultants are always fast in condemning Excel, when all what they are is being just alien to it in the first place. They tell you, it is prone to errors and you need to invest. But human induced error will be at place in any system. Ask any data migration engineer or project lead if you believe sql and nosql databases are easy to navigate or migrate by design (they can be in theory, of course). So mostly it's not thr software, it's the human behind the keyboard. 20 years of BI, so I had my share of those stories.

Damn, better my business steer clear of businesses from you country.
US right?