Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by justin66 2566 days ago
> I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units.

McLaren recently failed to qualify for the Indy 500 (McLaren!) due in part to a unit conversion problem made prior to the last day of qualifying.

https://autoweek.com/article/indy-500/mclaren-ceo-zak-brown-...

1 comments

To be fair, from my reading of the article, this was a metric-to-imperial conversion problem, meaning McLaren was used to working in metric, but the Indy 500 is in the USA, which uses the backwards and archaic US customary units, so someone screwed up in converting to those. This could have happened to any non-American racing team, and doesn't serve at all as an example of Brits sticking with obsolete units, but rather the opposite.

It does seem that McLaren made a lot of boneheaded mistakes here, but this example just doesn't go with the "Brits are still using imperial units" theme of this thread at all.