Formula 1 management shocked team used Excel for 20,000-part inventory, now replacing 'impossible to navigate' sheet

Williams F1 team
(Image credit: Williams F1 team)

Managing a Formula 1 team is challenging, typically leaning heavily on state-of-the-art technology and the most advanced automotive engineering to gain even the slightest competitive edge. Imagine the surprise of James Vowles and Pat Fry, who took over the team principal and chief technical officer roles at Williams F1 in 2023, when they found this F1 team had been relying on Microsoft Excel for the crucial Williams car build workbook. According to the digital motorsport channel The Race, this was just one notable feature of the “team’s outdated working practices and systems” that was holding back Williams, complained Vowles.

Vowles, who made his name at Mercedes, decided on two main areas of focus for his first year at Williams. First, the car’s technology was upgraded, with some sections of the vehicle requiring a tenfold increase in custom-made parts. Second, the creaking Excel spreadsheet that had barely coped with tracking parts previously was replaced by a new bespoke digital parts system.

Up to and including the 2024 Williams FW46 race car, the headlining Excel spreadsheet was crucial for building cars and managing parts. Vowles didn’t pull his punches when talking about the old system. “The Excel list was a joke,” blasted the new Williams team principal. “Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.”

The inherited Williams Excel system contained around 20,000 individual components and parts but didn’t include fields for essential data like component costs, stock levels, and lead times.

Vowles gave an example where using Excel to create an order for a car front wing (with 400 parts) would be a click-and-hope procedure because the Williams Excel workbook was useless in surfacing the information Vowles wanted at a glance. "You need to know where each of those independent components is, how long it will take before it's complete, how long it will take before it goes to inspection. If there have been any problems with inspections, whether it has to go back again," explained the team principal. He also opined that "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."

So, Vowles blasts Excel, variously describing it as "a joke" and "useless." However, some might argue that this office software doesn't have issues managing a 20,000-item parts list, and an expert Excel wrangler could have made a big difference to the spreadsheet users. For some examples of pushing Excel to its proper limits, recently, we reported on a software developer managing to shoehorn GPT-2 (the 'Small' version with 124 million parameters) into Microsoft's spreadsheet app to create a working local LLM. Earlier this year, a hobbyist built a functional 16-bit CPU with 128KB of RAM and a 16-color display into Excel...

Replacing Excel contributed to millions spent on Wiliams F1 team transition

F1 racing teams are allowed a budget of $135 million per season (not including driver pay). Vowles and Fry have decided to use more than they would like from that budget to bring Williams up to date, which may consist of a few million for banishing Excel’s use as the container for the firm’s workbook and parts list. “It’s an opportunity that’s not small,” said Vowles. “It’s millions of pounds of cost cap money. And it’s tenths of performance in just having processes, structure, and system.”

The transition has precipitated a painful 2023/24 Winter while these big tech and culture changes are being implemented. Still, after taking this bitter medicine, it is hoped Williams will “enjoy some success a bit later on into the year.” Vowles reckons it could take three years for the 1,000-strong workforce to fully adopt the new culture and work together like a well-oiled machine.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

TOPICS
  • USAFRet
    Seen this far too many times.

    Excel is a great calculator.
    It is a very very poor database.
    Reply
  • CelicaGT
    Done correctly Excel is fine for such a small parts book (similar databases underpin many parts management suites). Sounds like this wasn't done correctly a an Excel database is only as good as the person who made it. That said, there is better software, it just costs a LOT of money. I think ours is many thousands of dollars per month, but it is a whole suite and our database has millions upon millions of individual sku's.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    SQLite really isn't difficult to setup, people.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    CelicaGT said:
    small parts book
    An F1 team is much more than "small".

    And they do have a very large budget.

    SQLServer, or even MS Access, would have been much better.
    And not cost much more, if anything.

    People start with Excel, because it puts everything in nice neat rows and columns.

    But very quickly run past its capabilities as a database.

    As said, I've seen this exact scenario many times.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Give it to one of the people who compete in the Excel World Championship, let them make it into a powerful tool for a fraction of what they're going to spend.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    Give it to one of the people who compete in the Excel World Championship, let them make it into a powerful tool for a fraction of what they're going to spend.
    Could it be done in Excel?

    Yes.

    But there are much better tools, with far less hassle.
    Reply
  • CelicaGT
    USAFRet said:
    An F1 team is much more than "small".

    And they do have a very large budget.

    SQLServer, or even MS Access, would have been much better.
    And not cost much more, if anything.

    People start with Excel, because it puts everything in nice neat rows and columns.

    But very quickly run past its capabilities as a database.

    As said, I've seen this exact scenario many times.
    In comparison to retail or industrial it is a tiny number of sku's. Still not something I'd use Excel for as it gets veeeery sluggish and there are all kinds of network access issues in my experience. When many are accessing, only one can have write privilege. One of our larger customers uses Excel as a planning database. It is awful. And this is a 40 billion dollar company I am talking about..... I once used one at a shop I once worked at that the owner wrote, it could do everything a modern parts management system can with the exception of auto ordering sku's that had reached -min- level. The field would change colour once -min- was reached so it was kinda useful with the small number of sku's we had there.The only reason this was done was cost. Small rural shop run by very cost conscious people.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    CelicaGT said:
    In comparison to retail or industrial it is a tiny number of sku's. Still not something I'd use Excel for as it gets veeeery sluggish and there are all kinds of network access issues in my experience. When many are accessing, only one can have write privilege. One of our larger customers uses Excel as a planning database. It is awful. And this is a 40 billion dollar company I am talking about..... I once used one at a shop I once worked at that the owner wrote, it could do everything a modern parts management system can with the exception of auto ordering sku's that had reached -min- level. The field would change colour once -min- was reached so it was kinda useful with the small number of sku's we had there.The only reason this was done was cost. Small rural shop run by very cost conscious people.
    Exactly.

    20k "items" is not that much.

    But it depends on exactly what they're doing with it.
    Just a list is one thing. But once you add in all the potential inter-dependencies and other functions....Excel is NOT the tool for this.

    The clown that built this, and then follow on clowns that modified it....shame on them.
    It is now unusable and unmanageable.

    A proper database application would easily work.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    The current operating budget cap for F1 teams is ~$140 million.

    There is no excuse for cheaping out on your IT infrastructure.
    Reply
  • why_wolf
    In regards to size the number parts doesn't really matter. It's how many transaction and how frequently they happen that kills Excel as a simple database tracker.

    If this was just a one man junk yard where he keeps track of all the spare parts he's salvaged in Excel it would work perfectly even up to millions of parts. The low volume of changes keep it very manageable. This is the Excel trap business fall into as most start out in that low volume easy to manage range and then slowly expand into the unmanageable range.

    But if you have more than one users and they are are making constant changes it just falls apart. Of course this happens with bull blown billion dollar ERP databases too. If people don't follow procedure religiously the database won't know anything, just ask Boeing what happen to those four bolts.
    Reply