Mercedes will likely be unable to take away the front-right wheel nut from Valtteri Bottas’ Monaco Grand Prix race automotive till it returns to the group’s UK manufacturing facility this week.

Bottas was working in second place earlier than he stopped for a scheduled tyre change mid-race, just for Mercedes to wrestle to take away the tyre. It later revealed the wheel nut had been machined to the axle by the wheel gun utilized by its pit crew.

Mercedes technical director James Allison revealed the automotive left Monte Carlo with the wheel nut nonetheless connected.

“We ultimately did not get the wheel off, it’s sat in our storage with the wheel nonetheless on it,” Allison mentioned after the race.

“It should be floor off, get a Dremel [tool] out and painfully slice via the remnants of the wheel nut. We’ll do this again on the manufacturing facility.”

Allison defined how the difficulty had occurred on the pit-stop.

“If we do not fairly get the pitstop gun cleanly on the nut, then it might chip away on the driving faces of the nut,” Allison mentioned.

“We name it machining the nut. It’s a bit like whenever you take a Phillips head screwdriver, and you do not get it squarely within the cross of the screwdriver.

“You begin to spherical off the driving face of the screwdriver slots, and you then simply merely cannot take the screw out of no matter it’s you are attempting to take it out of as a result of you haven’t any longer obtained the driving faces.

“A really comparable factor occurs with our pitstop nuts if the gun begins spinning and chipping off the driving faces of the wheelnut.

“Given the facility of the gun, you’ll be able to find yourself with no driving face and also you simply machine the nut all the way down to a spot the place there’s nothing left to seize a maintain of, and that’s what we had right now.”

The difficulty pressured Bottas to retire from the race. With Bottas’ teammate Lewis Hamilton ending seventh, and Pink Bull pair Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez ending first and fourth respectively, Mercedes has relinquished the lead of the drivers’ and constructors’ championships.