Bottas wheelnut still stuck on Mercedes car after pitstop issue
I was reading today that Mercedes will only be able to remove the wheelnut from Bottas’s car upon returning to its factory after his race-ending pitstop issue in Monaco.
James Allison had this to say:
“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.
“You start to round off the driving face of the screwdriver slots, and then you just simply can’t take the screw out of whatever it is you are trying to take it out of because you have no longer got the driving faces.
“A very similar thing happens with our pitstop nuts if the gun starts spinning and chipping off the driving faces of the wheelnut.
“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 wheelnut off the car at all, requiring a high-power drill to make the removal back at the factory.
“We eventually didn’t get the wheel off, it is sat in our garage with the wheel still on it,” Allison said.
“It will have to be ground off, get a Dremel out and painfully slice through the remnants of the wheel nut. We will do that back at the factory.”
That is a good wheel. (ie not the damaged one) You can see the vertical extensions that are normally captured by the gun in a normal removal.
In this tweet clip below of the stop you not only see the thousands of metal chards flying off but you see the wheel after with nothing left to grab on to.
I must admit I find it bizarre that they dont carry something that allows them to get the wheel off in a case like this. All they can do now is take the whole corner off to remove the stuck wheel! If it has to go back to the factory to be removed its a good job this is not a back to back weekend. They have a week to do it.