Lightning truly struck twice in the worst possible way at Interlagos, as Crash.net reports. Valtteri Bottas saw his Sao Paulo Grand Prix come to a bitter end before the lights even went out on Sunday. While completing his reconnaissance laps to the grid, a routine tire change turned into an absolute disaster for Cadillac.
Mechanics wrestled frantically with the right-rear corner of the machine on the grid as the start approached. A cross-threaded wheel nut locked the tire in place, defying every effort to remove it before the race began. The team ultimately had to officially retire the car on the grid and wheel it back into the garage, where it reportedly took six hours just to get the stuck wheel off.
"It’s sad that we were unable to start the race today," Valtteri Bottas said, pointing to the inability to remove the right rear wheel nut after their pre-grid tire change attempt. While noting they are not yet sure what caused the failure, he highlighted that they managed to show decent pace at times the day before and intend to regroup to finish the season on a positive note.
Cadillac team principal Marcin Budkowski called it a challenging day that brought a frustrating end to a triple-header. He confirmed the cross-threaded wheel nut forced the pre-race retirement and praised the relentless efforts of Valtteri Bottas and the garage crew while vowing to investigate the root cause.
Remarkably, this mechanical nightmare is not entirely new for the Finn. Valtteri Bottas famously suffered a similarly bizarre retirement at the 2021 Monaco Grand Prix when a wheel nut machined onto the axle during a pit stop, forcing Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin to admit at the time that the damaged nut left them no option but to park the car.
Now, the stakes couldn't be higher. Valtteri Bottas is fighting to keep his seat at Cadillac, with the American team currently weighing up whether to replace him with Colton Herta.
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