Mercedes explain reason for keeping wheel nut on after Monaco disaster
F1 team Mercedes has come out and explained the reason for keeping Valtteri Bottas’ dysfunctional wheel nut on long after the Monaco GP.
The weekend at Monaco was an absolute disaster for Bottas. When he arrived for a routine pit stop, one of his car’s wheel nuts just wouldn’t come off. Mercedes couldn’t get him to continue the race no matter what they tried. Hence, he was forced to retire.
Mercedes later admitted that they could not get the nut out even after the race. Such a rare problem affected Bottas’ race, who was in the running for P1 before his bad luck.
Mercedes engineer James Vowles said, “I’m fairly confident that by some time on Tuesday, we would have that front right wheel removed. We did certain steps in Monaco to try and remove it, some during the pit stop, some just afterwards.”
Mercedes had a big problem on their hands at Monaco. It dawned on them that they would need very heavy equipment to get it out. So they opted to leave it on and take the car back to their factory.
Vowles weighed in on that sequence of events, saying, “We concluded that we were going to need some fairly heavy equipment and specialist equipment. That would be better done here in the factory.”
Double failure
With Bottas out of the race, all eyes were on Lewis Hamilton. Sadly, the reigning champion could not get back into the race from his poor qualification position. Also, a rare pitting mistake from Mercedes resulted him only securing a P7.
Lewis was called into the pits to undercut Pierre Gasly. But it didn’t work, and when he came out, Gasly and Vettel went ahead of him. Hamilton was fuming at the failure, but there was nothing he could do. Monaco is a tight track to overtake on, so he couldn’t get back in the race.
All Mercedes can do now is to leave this disastrous weekend in their rear-view mirror. They had to Azerbaijan next, and you can bet Bottas and Hamilton will be itching to deliver a response.
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