As it turns out, the pit crew is just about the only functional part of the modern Ferrari team.
This was 2008 when they were fighting for titles still (turns out they were robbed and the FIA knew about it and let it play out).
That said I imagine what Jonathan Wheatley would be able to achieve in a task similar to this since he had the Red Bull team maintain a consistent sub-2 second pit stop at Red Bull and he was able to significantly quicken the Sauber one this year.
To play devil's advocate a bit, Ferrari won both championships in 2007 and the constructors in 2008, so it's hard to say they were robbed when they actually won. Massa though, is another story.
2008 -> 2021 bookends
"Some aspects of the Formula One handover were not transfer- able to the medical handover process. When the consultant from Formula One went to GOSH and looked at the whole handover process, he said it would be best to engineer out parts and get new equipment. He noted the complex technical problems with the handover ... The Formula One consultant asked, “Why don’t you just have one thing that does both and has its own power supply and its own ventilator?” This was obviously what needed to be done, but it turned out not to be feasible since manufacturers were not interested in producing the needed equipment. They were not interested because the market is very small (only children) and hospitals would never be able to replace all its beds at the same time due to the exorbitant cost of the proposed new equipment. While the Formula One crew can count on using technology to improve their handover process, the hospital team could not; they had to rely more on human beings and less on state-of-the-art technology."
> they had to rely more on human beings and less on state-of-the-art technology.
They would do better to look at the Michelin starred kitchens starting with leaning to keep their work spaces organized and clean no matter how fast they are moving. Here is a good example of an engineered kitchen. "Oui" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfxQuXT66s
Formula One teams are known to throw money (and lots of it) at problems. It works for them because:
- 2 drivers/cars per team.
- ~2 hour race on a weekend every ~2 weeks per season.
The hospital needs to do this for hundreds of patients every day. They need solutions that can scale (cost less per person). This was about one specific problem (handover) but different patients could bring with them different complications and add new constraints.
Still very cool though. Glad they got some actionable insights.
AI summary for those who are really confused by the terrible title:
Great Ormond Street Hospital in London improved patient safety during cardiac surgery handoffs by benchmarking against Ferrari’s Formula One pit crew. Two exhausted surgeons watching F1 racing noticed the similarity between pit stops and their ICU transfers. After visiting Ferrari and studying their processes, the hospital implemented a new protocol with clear roles, choreographed movements, separation of equipment and information transfer, and designated leadership. This reduced combined equipment/information errors from 30% to 10%, though some F1 practices (multiple rehearsals, specialized equipment) weren’t transferable due to cost and complexity constraints.