Mercedes reveal 'painful' action needed to finally remove wheel from Bottas' car

Mercedes has revealed the drastic action it will need to take to finally remove a wheel from Valtteri Bottas' car.

Bottas' W12 departed Monaco after last night's grand prix with the right-front wheel still attached after a machined nut during his pit stop led to his retirement.

The wheel will be removed once it has returned to the team's factory in Brackley.

Technical director James Allison explained: "It will have to be ground off.

"[We will have to] Get a Dremel out and painfully slice through the remnants of the wheel. We’ll do that back at the factory.”

It was the second time this season Bottas has been involved in a pit stop where a nut has been machined by the wheel gun, albeit he fortuitously escaped the first time around in Bahrain.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has confirmed the team will review the design and material of the nut to see if improvements can be made.

Explaining in detail what unfolded with Bottas' stop, Allison added: "I can just tell you it’s a sort of more extreme repeat of the thing we have talked about in public before.

"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 the nut.

"It’s a little bit like when you take a Phillips head screwdriver and you don’t get it squarely in the cross of the screw and you start to round off the driving face of the screwdriver slots.

"Then you just simply can’t take the screw out of whatever it is you’re trying to take it out of because you’ve no longer got the driving faces. A very similar thing happens with our pit stop nuts.

"If the gun starts spinning and chipping off the driving faces of the wheel nut then in quite short order, given the violence and the power of the gun, you can end up with no driving faces and you just machine the nut down to a place where there is nothing left to grab a hold of and that is what we had.”

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