Valtteri Bottas' wheel nut still stuck on Mercedes F1 car
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Bottas ran second through the opening stint of Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix, sitting five seconds behind leader Max Verstappen when he came into the pits on Lap 30 to change tyres......But Mercedes was unable to get the front-right tyre off Bottas’s car, leaving him stuck in the pits...
Mercedes technical director James Allison explained how the nut had become machined to the axle by the wheel gun, causing it to get stuck.
“If we don’t quite get the pitstop gun cleanly on the nut, then it can chip away at the driving faces of the nut,” Allison said.
“We call it machining the nut. It is a bit like when you take a Phillips head screwdriver, and you don’t get it squarely in the cross of the screwdriver.
“Given the power of the gun, you can end up with no driving face and you just machine the nut down to a place where there is nothing left to grab a hold of, and that is what we had today.” Allison revealed that Mercedes was unable to get the wheel nut off the car at all, requiring a high-power drill to make the removal back at the factory.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said that there were “many factors” that contributed to the issue, refusing to put it down to a single error.
“We need to review the design, we need to review the material of our wheel nut, because the mechanics that operate the wheel nuts need to do it in a way that you can’t machine it off,” Wolff said.
“And as a matter of fact, a mechanic that did that is one of the best, and one of the fittest in terms of pitstop speed, that the team has.
“So there are always things coming together. It’s never someone’s fault, it’s always multi-faceted.”
A F1 wheel gun puts out 2200 ft-lb of torque !!
Wheel Gun & Wheel Nut
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