BIZARRE F1 failure blamed on Microsoft issue

Williams, Excel, Social — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 News & Gossip

BIZARRE F1 failure blamed on Microsoft issue

Williams had a nightmare in Australia

Originally written by Ronan Murphy. This version is a translation.

Tuesday 26 March 2024 17:00

Everyone who uses a computer for work is familiar with Microsoft Excel and Excel formulas. But few would have expected Formula 1 to be burdened by those same formulas.

A struggling Formula 1 team has blamed its recent failures on the track on an unworkable Excel sheet which was used to help source parts when building and designing the car.

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Williams team principal James Vowles was a major part of building this year's FW46, but revealed how last year's FW45 was designed from a list of parts on an Excel sheet as well as using modified existing parts rather than creating new ones. Additionally, some of the parts were still metal rather than carbon, making the FW45 heavier than it should have been.

One of the biggest problems Vowles encountered was the list of around 20,000 components in Microsoft Excel, which proved to be an extremely inefficient way of designing a Formula 1 car.

“The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update," Vowles told the Race.

“You need to go into the system, and they need to be ordered. Is a front wing more important than a front wishbone in that circumstance? When do they go through, when is the inspection?

“When you start tracking now hundreds of 1000s of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless.

“You need to know where each one of those independent components are, how long it will take before it's complete, how long it will take before it goes to inspection. If there's been any problems with inspections, whether it has to go back again.

“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.

“There is more structure and system in our processes now. But they are nowhere near good enough. Nowhere near.”

(SUM:F1) Microsoft Excel in Formula 1

Williams are not the only team who have been limited by their use of Microsoft Excel in Formula 1.

In 2017, Renault infrastructure manager Mark Everest explained to Ars Technica that the F1 team had been using a 77,000-line spreadsheet to track their car design ahead of the new season.

"It was a mix of data exports from the old ERP [enterprise resource planning] system, some transformations, some manual work. It was pretty much out of date as soon as it was created," Everest admitted.

That proved an unmanageable approach and forced the team to move to a more user-friendly cloud-based approach when tracking components, but like many frustrated office employees around the world, teams are still using Microsoft products to carry out day-to-day duties.

"Mostly it's Windows, for server and client," Everest continued. "We use Office 365 for collaboration and e-mail in the cloud, Sharepoint Online, and we're rolling out OneDrive to some users as a replacement for mapped drives. It makes it much easier to share data between Enstone, Viry-Châtillon, from the track, or even when people are at home."

So the next time you get annoyed at an Excel formula not working for you, just console yourself with the fact you don't have to use that formula to design a Formula 1 car.

Formula 1 Williams James Vowles