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scrollopyesterday at 8:31 AM1 replyview on HN

Interesting.

Another take-

"Two F1 fan surgeons found a way to visit Ferrari headquarters as a business trip."


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PaulRobinsonyesterday at 11:28 AM

There's actually a bit of crossover. This paper is quite old, but I know that other teams and other surgeons have visited each other plenty since this was published, and there's this cross fertilisation of ideas.

F1 is "important" in the sense that it is competitive, and so teams want to iterate and improve constantly. I think the fastest pit stop in the 2025 season 1.91 seconds, in which: the car is jacked, four tyres are removed, four new tyres are placed and secured into place, the car is dropped, the lane is checked for traffic, and then the car can move. There are thousands of permutations of how to get this right and that fast. And accuracy is important: get it wrong there is a risk of injury at worst, or a fine for an unsafe release at best.

ICU is obviously important in a different way. You can't really "experiment". Iteration needs data. So you need to go out and learn what good looks like from different disciplines, and then carefully plan the changes you want to make and get buy-in. Get it wrong, and people die. Best case scenario you're struck off, worst case you're going to prison for murder.

In dev speak, F1 can afford to be agile, ICUs need to be waterfall.

But because F1 needs to be precise and they perceive the dangers of imprecision so acutely from a monetary perspective (where you finish in the Worldwide Constructors Championship directly affects the profitability and viability of the team), they want to borrow ideas too.

It sounds ridiculous that surgeons and F1 garages would have so much to talk about, but it turns out, they really do feed ideas off each other sometimes.

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