The shocking details behind an F1 team’s painful revolution

the way Williams has started F1 2024 has laid bare the painful consequences of its much needed Revolution it's no secret that Williams has been battling with underinvested facilities and an outdated culture for many years with claims of the team being 20 years behind its rivals in some areas but we had no idea just how desperate its situation looked ahead of the new season as team principal James vs and chief technical officer pat fry tried to get the team to LEAP towards the required modern standards the depths of a brutal winter for Williams are quite shocking and the impact it has had on its pointless start of the new season is real costing the team lap time and valuable cost cap resources if this is sounding a bit dramatic we promise we aren't Hamming it up it surprised us when vs and Fry opened up about all this cast your minds back a few weeks and the only car you hadn't seen until the day before preseason testing was the Williams FW 46 we knew it was late because Williams had been quite open about that and the fact it was taking huge amounts of risk but it turned out this wasn't just because Williams was was trying to massively overhaul a car design philosophy that had consistently produced the same specific performance weaknesses it was much more fundamental than that and the impact was much greater than we could have possibly imagined vs has been banging the same drum about the team's outdated working practices and systems since he joined early last year and a key decision he made was for Williams to consciously make life harder for itself with its 2024 car this would be by Williams dramatically changing in what vows calls the car's technology base basically how the chassis was designed and built which meant the number of individual components making up the chassis went from a few hundred individual parts to over 2,000 alongside this vs wanted the development teams to work more in tandem so that the philosophy of Designing the car aerodynamically and mechanically changed as well vals also banned the contingencies he discovered existed in building the 2023 car things like using modified year old parts or metal bits instead of carbon which it turns out was initially the case on last year's FW 45 this was all part of breaking the old methods that vs and Fry believe made it impossible for Williams to compete for anything significant in F1 or make significant progress the upshot of all that was as much as 10 times as many individual items being designed and produced in some areas of the car using the same limited infrastructure that Williams is in the process of slowly improving this is where vals knew there would be a problem so much was changing in such a short time frame that it couldn't not cause issues V's logic was that Williams would go through all that pain in one winter and only have to go through it once but the impact was compounded by terrible systems that he had already seen a negative impact from on the team's only real inseason upgrade of 2023 vows has now admitted that the cost of what Williams went through over the winter was extraordinary and higher than what he expected and the reason why is astonishing we are not exaggerating when we say that up to and including the 20 24 Williams FW 46 its cars were being built using Microsoft XL unsurprisingly X Mercedes man vals describes the XL list managing 20,000 individual components and parts accounting for every nut and bolt as a joke and that it was impossible to navigate around or update now you could take a very generous view and say that all a team really needs is to list every item and then either build them or buy them kind of like a glorified set of instructions well that's obviously not the case this is how williams tracks everything not just quantities of parts needed there wasn't data on the cost of components how long they took to build how many were in the system to be built so imagine needing a front Wing which is an assembly of a few hundred items on its own all of which need to be built or ordered which items are available where are they in the factory do the items for the wing need to be prioritized over a front Wishbone that's also in development when is the part inspection date has it past inspection how long will it take for the whole part to be completed tracking hundreds and then thousands of components through the entire organization while missing that raw level of data makes an Excel spreadsheet useless it cannot cope with the level of complexity required to manage the build of an F1 car which means the system Falls over which means as vals puts it the people fall over all of a sudden you start to understand why this same team had such a bad 2019 car build that meant it managed to miss the start of that Year's preseason test vs didn't seem to fear the same fate this time but admits he had little confidence that the team would have every everything it needed by the first race of the Season he's amazed at how williams rallies and managed to produce what he reckons is more than any other team in a shorter period of time but he also admits they did this to themselves this has been the reality at Williams for many years although not always to such a chaotic extent vs reckons that if Williams had stuck with its usual processes and committed to a simple evolution of the 2023 car things would have been fine but he and Fry were new to this hence their shock at the reality they encountered and them demanding that multiple things be changed all at once V says the XL Spreadsheet was being migrated to a digital system at the same time the technology base we mentioned earlier in the video was going through its own colossal overhaul unsurprisingly doing both in tandem was a nightmare Williams was completely changing how things were stored digitally within the organization and the quantity of Parts being produced to be logged in this new system that people were unfamiliar with vs recalls hearing shop floor workers saying I don't know where this component is and having to physically look around the factory for certain parts delays led to staff having to sleep at the factory and effectively pull overnighters to get things ready according to vs the car was still just a big bag of bits by January fry likened it to the kind of thing that was more common in F1 teams more than 20 years ago in his words loads of bits would be late and someone would put their Superman underpants on over the outside of their trousers rush around and save the day fry reckons Williams is still working in that mode its process of making a car is inefficient leaving everything massively late without a good performance-based reason for that being the case it's one thing to be late with say a high performing item like a floor or a latest spec front Wing that will be bolted on at the test but fry says that Williams actually signed off the relevant AO surfaces quite early in the process yet was still somehow scrambling around late on that's because the flawed processes caused a mountain of parts to pile up delaying production it wasted time and it wasn't cost efficient either which is relevant in f1's budget cap era vs wasn't sure how williams would make up for that and unfortunately the answer was staff members breaking themselves to get the job done to quote fried directly I've never seen anything like it and I don't want to live it again you probably wouldn't think Williams had been through such turmoil just by looking at its 2024 results on paper Williams is in a slightly worse position than 12 months ago in that it's one point worse off after two races but it's still seventh in the championship and first of the non-sc scorers by virtue of Alex albon's 11th Place in Saudi Arabia in fact Alburn finishing 15th in Bahrain and 11th in Saudi means Williams is very close to the 10th and 16th it scored in the same races a year ago and what's more it's reduced its deficit to the front from just under 2% a drift of the fastest car at both circuits last year to 1.2% and 1.7% off in 2024 Alburn sees something Bitter Sweet in that it's encouraging for Williams to be a competitive force in the really close pack of five teams sniping for the top top 10 but it's also frustrating given what Williams could have without the winter of discontent the car is better and what Williams has aimed to improve with its new approach to development has paid off so the foundations look decent but there have been negative consequences the reliability problems that made Williams by far the least productive team in testing could have been avoided were it not late and underprepared some last minute items were even only arriving on the day of first practice during barang Grand Pre week that put Williams on the back foot and meant it couldn't optimize the season opener but there is also just raw performance missing as well because the car build being delayed meant not being able to prioritize parts that should be on the car already and would have brought more performance Alburn reckons it'll take six or seven races to start out developing Rivals claiming that there's a good chunk of time in the car we can't access right now that chimes with vow suggesting that Williams isn't short of ideas to improve the car from here but admits it is short of finances and time after what fry calls a viciously expensive winter what what all of williams' Key Personnel agree on is that all of this has been a necessary pain to experience vows believes Williams is already better off for it in some areas while fry says that the lingering problems will definitely be addressed for the 2025 car build it does fry a disservice to paint him as a glorified F1 team troubleshooter given his long distinguished F1 career but he is now trying to do for Williams what he's done most recently at McLaren and Renault in highlighting deficiencies and opportunities to improve Fry's outlook for where Williams can quite quickly make gains is is why V says everything we've covered in this video doesn't worry him for a second as the belief is emphatically that this can be fixed and will be fixed that will be partly through better processes and partly because the team leaders are adamant there is not a problematic resistance to the cultural changes they are pushing it's uncomfortable for some they admit that but everything they are preaching is based around obvious ways to make the workers's lives easier vs reckons it's a three-year process to get a 1,000 strong Workforce to fully adopt a new culture but before then he believes there are also unique systematic limitations that can be addressed in the short term and have a big benefit you're probably very used to hearing F1 people talking about marginal gains and how there are no silver bullets but vow claims that Williams is talking about regaining millions in budget cap spending and tenths of a second of performance just by having the right processes and systems given how ridiculous the winter of 2023 2024 sounds we're inclined to believe him and Alburn certainly does he thinks in the long long term this will all pay off because Williams could not make the big steps it needed by prioritizing safer easier short-term gains he's optimistic that Williams just has to take its medicine realize it's for the best and hopefully enjoy some success a bit later on into the year beyond that the expectation must be that this team will spend future Winters getting things done on time and chasing performance instead of shooting itself in the foot

Channel: THE RACE

Views: 503,740

Keywords: f1, formula 1, formula one, F1 news, F1 latest, F1 updates, F1 explained, The Race, the-race.com, grand prix, f1 2024, microsoft, Excel

Id: WazUi6K4W6w

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2024