Toyota discloses unprecedented details of F1 development

Heijunka (“Levelling Production”)

Mike Gascoyne: “Heijunka means instead of trying to do everything at the same time, you’re actually spreading the load across the whole year, which in our case means that at any one given time we’re actually putting a lot more effort into the important bits. It’s always been a classic thing to say this racing car is totally new, and every part is new. In other words, there are 4000 new bits. In fact 500 of them don’t actually make you go any quicker, but you had to redesign them all, all at once! You’re much better off saying I don’t want to redesign them all, I want to carry some over, so that I put the design time I’ve got into things that do make me go quicker. For example, once we knew the 2006 qualifying rules, we kept the same fuel system and fuel tank for the TF 06. Three designers would have spent three months doing all of that, and for what? What would you have got? It would do exactly what the old one did. You wouldn’t go any quicker, it would just be slightly different. If you carry it over, there’s all that resource free to put into things that make you go quicker. Having said that the TF 06B will have a different fuel system, because we’ll have more time, and be able to incorporate things that we’ve learned. You can make more progress by changing less.”