For Ars Technica, Kevin Purdy wrote about Williams Racing’s James Vowles and his disdain for the team’s car build workbook which was just a massive Excel spreadsheet:
The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was “a joke,” Vowles recently told The Race. “Impossible to navigate and impossible to update.” This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
(via Ars Technica)
The rest of the article goes into how spreadsheets are misused for large datasets, with disastrous effects such as false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices.
I’m sure there’s a “How many F1 engineers does it take to change a spreadsheet?” style joke in there somewhere.