Why F1 Wheel Nuts Cost £50'000
Formula 1 is expensive, no shock there. But did you know a single wheel nut on an F1 car can set a team back nearly £1,000? Multiply that by four wheels, multiple sets per race, and suddenly teams are pouring upwards of £50,000 just into these small parts every race weekend.
The story starts in the early days when pit crews hammered on wheel nuts to swap tires. Impact guns hadn’t turned up yet, and teams struggled with multiple studs that took ages to change. Cars used single centrelock nuts with wings to prevent the wheels spinning on the hub a mallet swung by hand signaled when the nut was tight enough.
Ferrari even equipped their road cars, like the 365 GTB Daytona, with mallets in the toolkit because that’s how they secured wheels back then.
Over time, engineers faced a serious problem: wheels under heavy load during braking and acceleration cause twisting forces that slowly worked nuts loose. To combat this, they reversed thread directions left and right side, so braking tightened rather than loosened nuts. But on driven rear wheels, this created its own headaches.
That ushered in an evolution: hexagonal wheel nuts with retention systems preventing them from flying off mid-race. Teams developed splined nuts that seated faster and allowed quicker pit stops. Captive nuts meant crews didn’t have to remove and replace nuts manually, streamlining the swap.
The nuts became part of the car’s aero story, too. Ferrari’s ingenious brake duct shrouds integrated into the wheel nuts cut drag but were banned for moving device concerns only to return as fixed shrouds that revolutionized airflow.
Today’s nuts feature twelve splines for perfect socket alignment, coarse threading for speed, and color-coding for quick pit recognition. Despite this, human error and tight pit lanes still cause dramas like Mercedes’ infamous stripped nut in Monaco.
Manufactured in-house with aerospace-level precision, every nut is x-rayed for cracks, anodized for durability, and made of lightweight aluminum that’s strong but wears quickly. The high wear plus limited reuse drives costs sky-high.
With 13 sets of tires handed out per race, teams burn through wheel nuts like candy. Even with some remachining, the weekend bill for a single car’s nuts tips over the £50,000 mark.
It's incredible to think such a small part carries so much engineering, innovation, and cost. But in a sport where tenths of a second matter, wheel nuts are one of many tiny details that add up to glory or disaster.
So next time you see a pit stop blitz, remember: that nut snapping on just right is worth more than most road cars.