Toyota discloses unprecedented details of F1 development

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Toyota discloses unprecedented details of F1 development

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“One of the biggest gains in engine performance is port design,” says Technical Director Engine Luca Marmorini. “So the quicker we can change a port, the better. A cylinder head is quite a time consuming part to make, and if we actually have to scrap stock, it’s a highly expensive part. So really the minimum stock we have, and the more flexibility to change the design of the port, the better it is purely for performance gains.”

As soon as TPS was introduced to cylinder head production in 2002, it became quickly apparent that major gains could be made.

“It took 67 days to produce a cylinder head, from the moment we received the casting to fitting it to an engine in the workshop,” says Andrea Schmidt, Senior Co-ordinator for TPS at Toyota Motorsport. “It was far too long, because whenever we had a new specification it took that long before the workshop had the new cylinder head, and then half of the season was over! So we were not flexible enough. We wanted to give design more flexibility, so we had to reduce that lead time.

We knew that another leading F1 team needed about four weeks. We wanted to set ourselves a challenging target, and that target was two weeks. So from nearly 0 weeks, we had to get down to two. Everybody said, “Forget it, this is impossible.” We thought we might get down to five weeks or six weeks, but we can’t beat four weeks…”

Despite their own initial scepticism, Schmidt and her colleagues began to study this extraordinary challenge. The first problem was that there was very little information on paper – the process appeared to have developed organically, with no real thought put into streamlining it.

“We examined the complete process from the moment we received the casting, the complete production area to the engine workshop included. We couldn’t just take out pre-machining, or final machining, or de-burring, we had to look at the complete process – all 67 days. We knew it would be a lot of work, and it would take us a lot of time, and we had to do it on top of our normal jobs.

“First we looked at the complete material flow. We had nothing on a sheet of paper, so we had no idea what the complete process looked like. Where does an operator get his information? Does he need to collect the part? Does he need to deliver the part? What is his process time? It took nearly a month to write the whole process down and have something that we could start from and discuss.

“We also had to look at quality. Green-stickered parts are 100% to drawing, and in the first season we raced with cylinder heads which were not greenstickered. So what we did was implement jidoka, which means whenever we have a problem, we stop production. It’s the responsibility of the operator to stop the production line.”

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