God damn aluminium wheel nuts :(

[maisbitt]

If they pulled a vacuum through the valve and then filled up, i'm sure they would've wrecked the tyre, it would've creased up flat all round on the rim, potentially warping belts and putting crease/stress fractures in the multilayered sidewalls. I'm sure it would be fine to evacuate the mounted tyre of air if a tyre was a simple single piece of moulded rubber that would be stretchy enough to recover it's shape, but there's so much more to a tyre's structure than that.

Nitrogen filling on a road tyre is a complete con/gimmick, unless the tyre is mounted and filled in a nitrogen atmosphere by people wearing breathing apparatus it cannot be done on a single valve system without having normal air in the tyre, and even then, only F1 cars and Aeroplane tyres go through the extremes in temperature during servce to benefit.