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Mercedes has still not succeeded in removing the wheel nut of the car Valtteri Bottas after it got stuck during the pit stop in Monaco. The team hopes that this can finally be solved at the factory with some heavy artillery
Bottas was allowed to kick off the Monaco Grand Prix from third place, with a teammate Lewis Hamilton on the seventh spot. Bottas got off to a good start, but could not manage Max Verstappen to pass. However, he continued to put pressure on and was on track to drag a podium spot out of the fire. In the thirtieth lap Bottas went into the pits for a new set of tires. However, when replacing the right front tire, things went completely wrong. Although the team went out of their way to blur the band, it didn’t want to break free. There was therefore nothing for Bottas to do but to end the race early and to get out.
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Why didn’t Mercedes get the tires off in Monaco?
Technical director James Allison explains exactly where things went wrong in Monaco. “If we don’t get the pit stop gun quite neatly on the nut, it can cause the drive surfaces to scrape away from the nut. We call this machining the nut,” Allison is quoted as saying Motorsport.com. Allison compares it to a home-garden-and-kitchen product: the screwdriver. “It’s the same if you take a Phillips screwdriver and you don’t get it square in the cross. You start rounding the drive face of the slots. Then you just can’t remove the screw because you don’t have the drive faces anymore.”
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According to Allison, the same thing happens with the nuts of the tires as soon as the driving surfaces are affected. “Given the power of the gun, you can end up without a work surface. Then you just work the nut to the point where there’s nothing left to grip. That’s what happened today.”
Problems not over yet
However, the problems are not over for Mercedes yet. “We couldn’t get it off in the end. The car is now in our garage with the wheel still on,” he reveals. “It will have to be ground down, a Dremel has to be used and then we have to painfully cut through the remnants of the wheel nut. We will do that when we get back to the factory,” said Allison.
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