Valtteri Bottas forced to retire from the Monaco Grand Prix, when he was running on second place due to the wheel nut trouble. The loss of P2 costs push down the Mercedes in the team championship standings.

During the Bottas pit stop – right front wheel nut’s face was extremely damage following the first attempt of wheel gun. The wheel nut’s front edges were instantly crushed away totally and there was nothing for the gun to grip when they attempted later.

We call it machining of the nut,” explained Mercedes technical director James Allison.

“It’s a bit like when you take a Phillips screw-driver and you don’t get it squarely in the cross of the screwdriver and you start to round off the driving face of the screwdriver slot.

“Then you simply can’t take the screw out of whatever it is you are trying to take it out because you’ve no longer got the driving faces.

“Very similar things happen with our pitstop nuts. If the gun starts spinning and chipping off the driving faces of the wheelnut, then in quite short order, given the violence and power of the gun, you can end up with no driving faces and you’ve just machined the nut down to a place where there’s nothing left to grab a hold of.

“That’s what we had today.”

Mercedes’s team boss Toto Wolff confirms that, they will review its F1 wheelnut design in a bid to avoid repeat the incidents.

Wolff refused to blame the wheelgun operator and said “there’s always many factors that contribute to such a catastrophic failure”.

“In that case we need to review the design, we need to review the material of our wheelnut, because the mechanics that operate the wheelnut need to do it in a way that you can’t machine it off.

“The mechanic that did that is one of the best, and one of the fittest in terms of pitstop speed that the team has.

“Things always come together, it’s never someone’s fault. It’s multifaceted.”

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