Toyota discloses unprecedented details of F1 development

It was an extremely complex and involved process. The project group, made up from members of the composites department and Schmidt, identified 42 individual steps in the production of the prototype, a figure that fell to 28 for subsequent chassis.

“The majority of work is manual, which takes a long time, so it was a tough target to say minus 20%. A lot of the people had the same reaction as in engine production. They said, “OK, but at the moment we are already working all day. So where do you want to shorten something?”

The key was to make more efficient use of everyone’s time: “We implemented performance analysis sheets, because we had no idea how long people needed for the process steps. It was difficult, because every operator felt controlled. We had data where we could see one guy needed nine hours for a job, and maybe another took six. We had to understand why this was so.

It was just a black box, so we had to go into details of every process. This was the thing that we had to push to team leaders and to managers – we needed the data. We had no understanding of the laminating process, it’s such a long term thing, and this was the only opportunity we had.”

Maintaining quality is essential in any area of a race team, but especially so in composites, and it was acknowledged within the company that there was too much wastage. Attacking this muda was a priority, and key to that was introducing the TPS principle of stopping production as soon as a problem was spotted.

“We implemented the same jidoka system that we used in engines, and we introduced scrap reports. Whenever we had a problem, we all got together to discuss it. We needed to make sure that we were doing something, and that somebody followed up.

“We also instigated problem sheets, so that whenever the operator had a problem he filled out the sheet and said, “Because of this or that, I lost two hours,” so again we had data we could analyse. This was important because we knew we only had half a year.

With the feedback from the operators and the problem sheets, we set a priority list, and decided that these are the main problems we need to concentrate on first – all the others were addressed later. We made sure we really had responsible people tackling the problems. For example design might say, “I know I need to change the drawing,” or “I need to keep an eye on it next time.””

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