Mercedes found themselves at the heart of disaster at the Monaco GP as Valtteri Bottas’ front right tyre couldn’t be removed during a pitstop on lap 30. This left Valtteri no option but to retire his car
Mercedes have still not been able to remove the wheel due to a damaged wheel nut and can only be removed back at their workshop where it will all need to come apart.
“The wheel nut will not come off!” 🎙
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) May 23, 2021
Disastrous scenes for Mercedes, they fail to undercut Pierre Gasly with Lewis Hamilton, and Valtteri Bottas is forced to retire!#SkyF1 | #F1 | #MonacoGP 🇲🇨 pic.twitter.com/gOoRRS2jZq
“We eventually didn’t get the wheel off, it is sat in our garage with the wheel still on it,” Mercedes technical director James Allison said, as quoted by Motorsport.com. “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.”
Team boss Toto Wolff added that it had “never happened to that extent before” and was “something we need to understand”.
The instance happened after the pit stop gun wasn’t applied at a clean angle, causing it to chip away the driving faces of the nut.
Even rival team Ferarri tried to help remove the wheel after the race but with no luck.
Mistakes can be made when working on cars, from the simplest of errors to the larger issues, each in their own is easy to make and often comes with frustrating consequences, but its all part of working with complex machinery.
You can read an in-depth review of the mechanical blunder here or alternatively, click below.
