24/05/2021
NEWS STORY
It's a good job Valtteri Bottas climbed out of his car to retire from the Monaco Grand Prix, for the offending wheel nut is still stuck in place.
"Sitting in the car at the pit stop, I knew it was a slow one," said the Finn following yesterday's race, which witnessed his second DNF of the season, "and I was calculating Sainz getting past, then Norris, and when it got to 30 seconds, I couldn't believe it."
Well almost 24 hours later the offending wheel nut is still firmly stuck in place.
"If we don't quite get the pit stop gun cleanly on the nut then it can chip away at the driving faces of the nut, we call it machining a nut," explained James Allison.
"It's like when you take a screwdriver and don't get it squarely in the screw and you round off the face and then can't take the screw out as you haven't got the driving faces," he added.
"If the gun starts spinning and chipping off the driving faces of the wheel nut then in quite short order, given the violence and power of the gun, you just machine the nut down to a place where there's nothing left to grab a hold of.
"We didn't get the wheel off," he confirmed. "It'll have to be ground off, get a Dremel out and painfully slice through the remnants of the wheel nut, we'll do that back at the factory."
Editor Balfe had a somewhat similar experience at the weekend when a retaining screw fell out meaning his fridge door was in danger of falling off. Somehow, whilst keeping the door in place, finding the screw - and a magnetised screwdriver - not to mention keeping an inquisitive cat out of said fridge, the editor was able to get the screw back in. You have our assurance that no expletives were uttered during the course of the incident.
Check out our Sunday gallery from Monaco, here.