Force India has explained the issue that caused Sergio Perez to lose a wheel from his Formula 1 c🐻ar coming through the quick Turn 7 during second practice for the French Grand Prix on Friday at Paul Ricard.

Perez's rear-left wheel br🌼oke free of his car as he moved onto the Mistral Straight, s🍷ending his car into a spin while the wheel bounced into the barrier before coming to rest in the centre of the circuit, resulting in a red flag.

T🥀he incident ended Perez's session early, and prompteཧd Force India to keep teammate Esteban Ocon in the pits until it could be sure the same issue would not occur on the Frenchman's car.

Chief operating officer Otmar Szafnauer later confirmed that a bo🍒lt had come loose on the wheel, causing the wheel to break free, but said he did not expect the stewards to take any action for an unsafe release.

"It looks like one of the retaining bolts on one of the plates within💦 the wheel worked its way loose, and therefore that meant that when the wheel clamped up, it wasn’t really on a true surface," Szafnauer explained.

"We just have to make sure that we check all t🗹he wheels to make sure all those bolts are in place. I think it’s an issue of continuing to learn because I think it’s a bolt that is lock-tighted in and torqued in and never checked. I think over time, they may start coming undone. It looks like we’ll have to check them now, retorque them once in a while.

"There's no fine yet, and I don’t think we deserve one, so hopefully we won’t get one. It could very well have been that the bolt star🅘ted coming undone after the release, so it was released safe. You don’t know."

Despite a difficult day of running, Perez was happy with is first imp🍸ressions of Paul﷽ Ricard, having never raced at the track before.

"It was not the easiest Friday for us," Perez said. "Unfortunateꦗly we lost a lot of time this afternoon with the issue I had on my car. We lost a bit of track time in the morning so we are missing some information ahead of the race, especially on the tyres. However, we still have some practice tomorrow so we will see what we can do.

"Despite these problems, I like the new circuit. I wasn’t very positive about it until today, but now that I drove i𒈔t for the first time I quite like it. The wind is a big issue: it changed between the two sessions and it took a lot of time to get used to it. I had a couple of moments on my soft runs, but I wasn’t the only one.

"It’s hard to tell where we stand but oꦇur target for tomorrow is d༒efinitely to be up there fighting to be best of the rest."