Spacepace wrote: ↑23 May 2021, 20:35
joetoml1n wrote: ↑23 May 2021, 20:28
Marty_Y wrote: ↑23 May 2021, 18:28
Who makes the wheel nuts, is it Pirelli or Mercedes that are responsible for them?
This isn't the first time a problem taking off a wheel has cost Mercedes, I wonder if the issue is caused by Mercedes's wheel gun or the wheel nuts themselves?
It was terrible weekend, I just hope Mercedes can bounce back stronger.
Mercedes design and make them. They’re designed to be as light as possible, yet obviously they still have to be secured with enough force and allow for the retaining device, as per the regs (to stop them loosening/coming off on track). Obviously the margins are tight.
Those guns spin at 1000’s of RPM, and although they’re designed to locate easily onto the nut, if there’s not enough force pushing the socket onto the nut it can easily be spat back out. Speaking from personal experience here!
A couple seconds of spin over the sides of the nut will be enough to machine the locating grooves right off, which appears to be what happened.
In your opinion do you think Mercedes will reengineer the wheel nuts or is it the fault of the operator
I think it will definitely be looked at. It’s possible to machine different socket grooves or castellations onto the same base nut - meaning no change to wheel rim, hub or possibly even socket.
Of course, there could be a way to improve the design with lessons learned, even if it was human error, as it might be possible to mitigate that in the future by a design change.
Of course, there could have been some other factor. We don’t know if there was debris in there, an over tightening before hand - unlikely on the grid as it’s usually done with a large torque wrench rather than wheel guns (for that reason), but there could have been an outside factor.