It is very rare for hybrid-era F1 titans to make huge mistakes in Mercedes. It does happen, however, and for some reason it’s more likely during Valtteri Bottas’ pit stops. The team messed up massively during the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix, ruining both his and George Russell’s stops by shuffling sets of tires. This year it messed up the Finnish driver again with an 11-second stop.
Mercedes has admitted that pit stops aren’t really his forte right now. After the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, where a problem with the wheel pistol messed up Lewis Hamilton’s pit stop, Andrew Shovlin, trackside technical director, said: “We lose time with pit stops. In the long term, we are still thinking about what to do with it can do.” the crew, whose equipment is trying to find a little more time in the stops. “That could have been postponed to the more immediate time after the right front wheel pistol completely sheared off the teeth it was supposed to snap into during Bottas’ pit stop in Monaco – and a day later the team still can’t take the tire off the car.
How it happened
Bottas drove from second to pit on lap 31 of the Monaco Grand Prix. At this point he definitely had the better weekend of the two Mercedes cars – Lewis Hamilton had problems in qualifying and was in seventh place because he had to worry about midfield, while Bottas was not in second place after pole sitter Charles Leclerc able to start the race. If that sounds like a suspiciously large number of things going on during the famous Monaco Processional Grand Prix, you are right and there would be more of them soon.
When he pitted, Bottas had a set of soft tires on which (according to the rules) he had set his fastest lap in the second qualifying. So it wasn’t the first time that they were edited, which may have had some relevance to what happened. On the other hand, this is F1 and tire sets are exchanged several times during each session throughout the weekend.
Three of Bottas’ tires went smoothly, but he was pitted as the mechanics struggled to remove the right front, waiting for excruciating seconds that stretched over half a minute before the crew had to admit defeat. Since they couldn’t remove the tire, they couldn’t leave Bottas’ car out of the pits – even if it was possible to drive another 47 laps around Monte Carlo with a used soft tire, mixing compounds and tire sets is prohibited in the rules.
Formula 1 wheel pistols rotate at 10,000 rpm and have a torque of 3,000 Newton meters, so they kick off with a real kick. You can see aluminum fly off the wheel nut in shards as the gun flattens it instead of blocking it:
Bottas said: “When I was in the car for the pit stop, I knew it was slow and I expected Sainz to pass, then Norris, and when it got to 30 seconds I couldn’t believe it.”
“It’s obviously very disappointing and we have to learn so that it never happens again. It was bad luck on my part and as a team it will be a priority for us to improve our pit stops in the future. Our pit stops weren’t.” Our greatest strength this year – there is no one to blame. As a team, we just have to get better. “
And the thing still won’t move
The wheel nut is not satisfied with playing a leading role in the glamorous Monaco Grand Prix, but gets stuck. Mercedes still can’t take the bike off the car and the team has to send it back to the factory to try drastic solutions.
Technical Director James Allison confirmed, “We didn’t take the bike off, it’s in our garage with the bike rack on it. It needs to be sanded off. “
“”[We’ll need to] Take out a Dremel and cut painfully through the remains of the wheel nut. We’ll do this back at the factory, “he concluded.
This is obviously not good news if the team were to prepare Bottas’ car for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. The fact that Mercedes isn’t entirely sure how the whole thing happened instead of properly focusing on the wheel also makes it a lot worse as it doesn’t know it won’t happen again, which means every single one Wheel pistol and wheel nuts must be looked at.
It’s a crazy incident – unlike anything normally seen in Formula 1 – but that doesn’t mean that lightning can’t strike twice, especially given the team’s generally unfortunate pit stop situation.
The situation is so extreme that team boss Toto Wolff described Bottas’ luck: “It seems like he’s cursed.”
What it did
Bottas’ retirement from second place brought Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and McLaren’s Lando Norris to the podium. All very personable when the former teammates sprayed the champagne, but that meant that Verstappen was the only representative of the two best teams who was up there with them.
Without Mercedes presence, Hamilton was pressed at the end of the points and was outbid by Sergio Perez during Red Bull’s smooth pit stops, which drastically swung the title. Although Bottas, who finished second, would not have stopped Verstappen from overtaking Hamilton in the drivers ‘title to lead the F1 World Championship for the first time in his career, it would have prevented Red Bull from overtaking Mercedes by one point in the constructors’ title fight .
Even though it’s only five races and Mercedes has been numerically on its hindfoot before (it wasn’t until 2019 that they followed Ferrari at the start of the season), that’s a huge psychological benefit in handing Red Bull over in a really close fight.
To a team that has won every single driver and constructor title since 2014, it might sound a bit like F1 101 that they can’t make their pit stops right, but it wasn’t too important to them until recently either.
Now that the 2021 Formula 1 season is indeed very close, the relatively large leads Mercedes often had over other cars have vanished, and slower stops than Red Bull are a serious problem. It even got Mercedes into trouble with the energy drink brand’s junior squad when Hamilton failed to undercut Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri in Monaco because the team assumed a one-and-a-half second lead would be enough.
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