from Hacker News

A Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet from Hell Slowed Williams' F1 Cars for Years

by aloukissas on 3/31/24, 2:03 AM with 48 comments

  • by vsskanth on 3/31/24, 3:19 AM

    I work in Motorsports and a parts tracking database is an actual unsolved problem with each team building it's own bespoke solution. It's also kinda unique because your simulation tool is connected to the parts database and part of the tool has to work offline for running simulations in the plane.

    I'm not really a database person so never really understood why off the shelf solutions aren't typically used here.

    I'm guessing Williams probably just didn't have the budget to build one and didn't know any better so they used Excel.

  • by rqtwteye on 3/31/24, 2:21 AM

    I wouldn’t blame this on Excel. Williams was just grossly mismanaged for a long time. I have read some interviews with Vowles and it seems the management simply had no clue how to run an F1 team.

  • by cjk2 on 3/31/24, 4:28 AM

    I’m not even surprised. I worked at a company whose bug tracking system was an excel spreadsheet mailed around. I’m not talking 2-3 engineers, I’m talking 250 engineers. There was one guy whose responsibility was to consolidate all the copies once a week. You can imagine how much information was lost there.

    I put JIRA in there because even that was less shit.

    Edit: also their VCS was a giant corrupted SourceSafe database as well.

  • by themerone on 3/31/24, 3:22 AM

    Excel is a drug, and a lot of junkies have no interest in quitting. I actually work on software that has been used to manage the development of race cars. A couple sister departments use excel for everything my app does and are too set in the ways to consider anything else.

  • by Jakob on 3/31/24, 5:48 AM

    Nearly all spreadsheet replacement software is worse though: it’s seeming clarity comes from being overly rigid or overly difficult to configure.

    I don’t get the hate for spreadsheets. It has APIs, great primitives, good automation capabilities, im-/export, and is human-readable and writeable.

    This particular spreadsheet from the article might have gone bad, but for centrally tracking an 20,000 item list, a spreadsheet doesn’t seem to be completely out of place.

    To improve on it for a presumably very specialised use case with recurring changes and adaptive processes that might give you an edge over competitors, they probably need their own small development team. And this can of course go bad quickly too.

  • by wideroots on 3/31/24, 2:33 AM

    So the tool (in this case, Excel) was not the problem but it was the people using the tool. Cool.

  • by joezydeco on 3/31/24, 3:41 AM

    Well, that was the bad news. The good news is that they're migrating to SAP.

  • by croes on 3/31/24, 3:13 AM

  • by mdekkers on 3/31/24, 5:03 AM

    Many years ago, I was sent in to, incidentally, a major car-parts reseller - almost all car parts in the EU and UK pass through this firm. This was a family business, dad had built the business, retired, and the kids were running the place. Pretty much the first order of business for the kids was the modernisation of the IT systems.

    My initial task was to do an assessment of who was using what, and what for, which all went really smooth, until we got to the “accounting floor”. I couldn’t get in, as the accounting team had locked the doors, and locked themselves in. Part of the modernisation was replacing the 100% Excel-based parts/accounts/supplier/customer ERP system with something that wasn’t Excel, and they simply weren’t having any of it.

    We walked away from that project, a competitor gleefully took it over, got caught in a swamp of technical and legal complications, and lost a lot of time, money, and people.

  • by dang on 3/31/24, 6:59 PM

    Recent and related:

    The details behind an F1 team's painful revolution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39776108 - March 2024 (8 comments)

  • by auselen on 3/31/24, 8:38 AM

    I was expecting to read something like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

  • by kirkarg on 3/31/24, 4:36 AM

    And why not adopting a CMMS system? I'm missing something? Of course that you need to pay for it, monthly or one time payment, but they are made for this kind of job

  • by timmorgan on 3/31/24, 1:46 PM

    I was hoping for a floating point rounding bug in performance tuning or some such. This is just plain ol mis-management.

  • by WalterBright on 3/31/24, 5:38 AM

    Excel is the world's most popular programming language, by far.

  • by riwsky on 3/31/24, 3:50 AM

    I aspire to build software so despised as Excel. You either EOL a hero, or you sell upgrades enough to see yourself become the villain.

  • by darkhorn on 3/31/24, 10:40 AM

    They could have used Microsoft Access instead of Excel.

  • by iancmceachern on 3/31/24, 5:24 AM

    I've worked at places like this