11/04/2018
NEWS STORY
In the wake of a number of recent examples of unsafe release, the most high-profile being that during last weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix, which saw a Ferrari mechanic seriously injured and resulted in the Italian team being fined 50,000 euros, the FIA is to launch an investigation.
Earlier in the same weekend, Kimi Raikkonen, who was involved in Sunday's incident, was unsafely released, his car stopping out on track shortly after with a loose wheel, while in the space of a couple of laps in Melbourne both Haas drivers were eliminated from the race as a result of loose wheels, the second incident bringing about the Virtual Safety Car period that saw Sebastian Vettel use to his advantage.
With these four incidents in the space of a couple of weeks, and that of Ferrari mechanic Francesco Cigarini making it on to the front pages of the world's media, F1's governing body is to act.
"It's looking like less and less like a coincidence but the two incidences in Melbourne were quite clearly wheelgun operator error," the FIA's race director Charlie Whiting told the official F1 website. "They cross threaded the nuts and thought it was tight, came off and then realised a little too late it wasn't.
"In Bahrain, the guy hadn't even taken the wheel off, which is slightly perplexing," he added.
"Alonso lost a wheel in testing if you remember we went through it all with McLaren, they gave us a report in the week," he continued, referring to an incident in Barcelona earlier this year. "We discussed it with the Technical Working Group to understand it all, to make sure everybody else realises these things can happen, everyone tries to learn from them.
"What happened was that the design of the nose piece that goes into the axle, that is the thing that holds the two-stage retention mechanism. But the way that is fixed into the axle was not quite strong enough so the wheel was a little bit loose, it worked itself loose because it had done four laps prior to that.
"So when the wheel started to tip a little bit, it put abnormal loads into the things that were holding the nose in and once the nose came out, there was no retention. So a lesson to be learnt there - that was shared with everyone in the Technical Working Group so that they can all look at that and make sure their designs aren't similar.
"Of course they said ours won't do that..."