Formula 1 management shocked to learn team used Excel for 20,000-part inventory

You'd think a team working on Formula 1 cars would be using advanced software, but nope... it's been discovered that an F1 team has been using Microsoft Excel for the Williams car build workbook.

James Vowles and Pat Fry took over the team principal and chief technical officer roles for the Williams F1 in 2023, discovering the team had been using Excel to manage the car. The Race reports that this was just one of the features that the "team's outdated working practices and systems" that was holding back Williams, according to Vowles.

Vowles recently worked for Mercedes before joining the Williams F1 team, where he aimed on two parts of focus for his first year with Williams. The car's technology would need to be upgraded, with some sections of the vehicle needing a 10x increase in custom-made parts, while the second was the Excel spreadsheet that couldn't handle tracking parts, and be replaced with a completely new digital parts system.

Racing up into and including the 2024 Williams FW46 race car, the F1 team was using an Excel spreadsheet to build the car, and managing all of its various parts. Vowles wasn't happy about this, telling The Race that "the Excel list was a joke," adding that it's "impossible to navigate and impossible to update".

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James Volwes (source: Williams F1 team)

There were around 20,000 individual components and parts inside of the Excel spreadsheet, and this didn't even include fields for things like component costs, stock levels, lead times, and more.

Vowles told the Race: "The Excel list was a joke. Impossible to navigate and impossible to update. Take a front wing. A front wing is about 400 different bits. And when you say I would like one front wing, what you need to kick off is the metallic bits and the carbon bits that make up that single front wing. 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?"

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Vowles continued: "When you start tracking now hundreds of 1000s of components through your organization 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".