Supplied by an Italian company called Paoli, F1 wheel guns are nothing short of incredible. Let’s go behind the scenes.
Formula 1 pit stops are a precisely choreographed dance, with more than 20 mechanics servicing one car. With no mistakes, they are able to change all four tires in approximately two seconds. While the perfect pit stop is a team effort, the wheel guns are an integral part of making wheel changes fast, reliable, and safe. Belt drive mechanism
An Italian company called Paoli (founded in 1968 by Dino Paoli) supplies wheel guns for all ten teams on the Formula 1 grid—we’d be remiss not to mention that Paoli also supplies wheel guns to American series like Indycar and NASCAR. The company began manufacturing air-powered impact wrenches (“wheel guns” if you will) for general automotive applications. However, everything changed in 1975, when there was a meeting with Enzo Ferrari—which marked Paoli’s entrance into motorsport.
Paoli currently sells its Hurricane 2.0 for around $10,000, but estimates F1 wheel guns can cost upward of $20,000–$30,000 with all of the add-ons that the teams will make. Yeah, these wheel guns are a cut above your average impact wrench that your local mechanic uses to torque your wheel lugs within an inch of their life.
High-performance materials aren’t just limited to Formula 1 cars. Paoli wheel guns (and wheel nuts) are also constructed using special materials—most of them are only seen in the aerospace industry.
The Paoli gun itself is constructed from aluminum ergal—an aluminum alloy that includes zinc, magnesium, copper, and trace amounts of silicon, iron, manganese, titanium, and chromium. Paoli also uses materials like titanium, carbon fiber, and aerospace-grade steel. (A quick disclaimer: aerospace-grade merely means that the material is designed for high-performance situations. This often just means that it could have a higher strength-to-weight ratio than the bottom-shelf stuff.)
Paoli actually opted to use a minimal amount of carbon fiber on the latest variant of the Hurricane. “We only have the front cover, the nose of the gun in carbon fiber … we could save 10–50 grams on the gun in the end, but we would prefer to have an aluminum cover to have more durability and more precision due to their tolerances,” Andrea Ori, a technician at Paoli, tells Popular Mechanics. He also notes that the company is one of the only wheel-gun manufacturers that fabricates and assembles all of the internals of their guns in-house at their factory in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Paoli’s main focus isn’t actually making its wheel guns more capable. “The mechanical gun is already in some cases above the limits that the user can manage,” says Federico Galloni, commercial and marketing director, and an executive board member at Paoli. This is really no surprise as the guns are currently able to spin up to 15,000 RPM and supply over 3,000 ft-lbs of torque. That’s why the Italian brand is currently focused on improving the reliability and usability of its guns.
Paoli’s Formula 1 wheel guns utilize mechatronic systems to help streamline Formula 1 pit stops. The term mechatronic merely refers to electrical engineering that supports a mechanical product. These systems have allowed Paoli to release a system called E-Shuttle, which is essentially a computer that controls the mechatronic functions of the gun. Paoli’s latest Hurricane 2.0 features an electronic actuator to change the direction in which the gun spins. “Originally you had to slam your hand against the wheel gun … and apart from not being a very fast process, you were literally stamping it,” Andrea Carretti, a mechatronics engineer at Paoli, tells Popular Mechanics.
E-Shuttle also gives teams telemetry data for the guns themselves—something that was previously reserved for Formula 1 cars themselves. This telemetry data monitors feedback from sensors on the guns to help improve performance and longevity. Carretti explains that data logging began as a way to tune racing cars more precisely, and it serves the same purpose here with the wheel guns. “Cameras are one way to optimize the process … but, if you can have feedback of what the gun is doing and how the operator is using it, then you can have a much more intimate evaluation process,” he says. This type of system is invaluable as it would not only mitigate the chances of sending a car out on track with a loose wheel nut—which is incredibly dangerous—but it could simultaneously speed up the pit stops themselves.
An increasing number of teams are also modifying the wheel guns, themselves, to increase usability and communication for pit stops. One such ease-of-use innovation (which you may have spotted under the lights at the 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix is an LED ring located toward the front of the gun—where it interlocks with the wheel nut. Apart from looking super cool, the system acts as a status indicator; white means it’s in loosening mode, blue means it’s in tightening mode, and green means the wheel has been properly tightened. Not only does the system eliminate the risk of releasing a car with a loose wheel, but it also allows for faster pit stops.
There’s a big misconception that Formula 1 teams are solely focused on achieving the fastest pit stop possible. While that’s obviously a high priority, consistency is more important than speed. Think about it: if you need to make three pit stops in a race, there’s little advantage in having one ultra-fast pit stop and two others that are slow—three seemingly “average” pit stops will be faster overall.
“In Formula 1 they are not searching for the fastest stop, but they are searching to be stable and consistent,” Mirco Grassi, technical office manager at Paoli, tells Popular Mechanics. “A possible threshold would be to have 80 percent of the pitstops under 2.7 and 2.8 seconds.”
Many new Formula 1 fans often notice that the cars use a single lug nut. According to Ori, this is not only for the speed of the pit stops, but also to give the gun itself a better interface with the wheel nut to put down its savage torque and speed. If F1 cars used the standard hexagonally shaped wheel nut, it would shear the threads off instantly.
One small piece of metal that turned the race on its head 🤯#MonacoGP 🇲🇨 #F1 pic.twitter.com/JIkFcDk18D
However, in rare instances, these specially designed pawls aren’t enough to tame the power of the wheel guns. Notice in the above tweet that Valterri Bottas (who was at the time driving for Mercedes F1) suffered a pit-stop error during the 2021 Monaco Grand Prix, when one of the wheel guns sheared the threads off of the wheel nut—giving the team no way to remove the wheel, and forcing the mechanics to retire the car from the race. This is especially impressive as the wheel nuts are constructed from aerospace-grade titanium. It’s important to note that this was not a fault of Paoli’s wheel gun, but was instead caused by a non-Paoli-designed wheel nut.
Racing teams are always looking for ways to maximize performance. Outside of the scope of the car itself, pit stops are a great way for teams to improve their performance. Less time spent in the pits—with the car not moving at racing speeds—will generally help teams and drivers maximize their time out on track. In the early 2010’s teams were guilty of powering the guns using helium instead of nitrogen or oxygen, which produced substantial increases in performance.
“It increased the speed of the guns so much that the sound of the guns themselves changed as well,” Federico Galloni, commercial and marketing director, and an executive board member at Paoli, tells Popular Mechanics.
“The molecular difference between helium and nitrogen makes for about a 15 percent increase in performance,” Thomas Decker, president and owner of United Race Parts—a United States distributor of Paoli products—tells Popular Mechanics. This is because helium is much less dense than the air we breathe. However, Formula 1 banned the practice in 2012 to save on costs and stop the usage of a non-renewable resource.
High-performance components often have what’s called a service life. This means that these heavily-strung components have a relatively short lifespan, and are replaced before they break. Paoli’s Hurricane 2.0 wheel gun is an absolute beast, but needs to be serviced every 250 cycles; Paoli counts one cycle as loosening and tightening a wheel. This means that F1 teams need to service their wheel guns once every four races.
Formula 1 is all about extracting the maximum amount of performance from every possible component that teams can get their hands on; wheel guns are no exception. In just the last couple of decades, they’ve evolved from high-performance variants of conventional impact guns to the mechatronic spaceships that we see today.
So next time you watch a Formula 1 Grand Prix (or really any motor race for that matter) you’ll now be able to appreciate the clever engineering that makes the wheel guns tick. You might also wonder how the mechanics’ arms don’t fall off under the otherworldly forces that these guns can dish out.
Matt Crisara is a native Austinite who has an unbridled passion for cars and motorsports, both foreign and domestic, and as the Autos Editor for Popular Mechanics, he writes the majority of automotive coverage across digital and print. He was previously a contributing writer for Motor1 following internships at Circuit Of The Americas F1 Track and Speed City, an Austin radio broadcaster focused on the world of motor racing. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona School of Journalism, where he raced mountain bikes with the University Club Team. When he isn’t working, he enjoys sim-racing, FPV drones, and the great outdoors.
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