Ross Brawn admits that having got things wrong in Valencia, his team has taken a step forward at Silverstone as it finally gets to grips with the challenge posed by the blown diffuser.

Mercedes is one of several teams that has chosen to copy the controversial device pioneered by Red Bull. However, like his rivals, team boss Ross Brawn admits that introducing it is far from straight forward. However, while some have temporarily given up, Mercedes has persevered, and this, according to Brawn, is the reason for the step forward this weekend.

"We had a number of problems which were very distracting over the weekend and we didn't do the fundamentals," he told reporters earlier, referring to the Valencia weekend. "When you don't do the fundamentals, you slip behind a few tenths and that's it.

"You saw with McLaren yesterday, that it's not an easy technology to get on top of," he continued, referring to the Woking team's problems which resulted in them shelving the device until the German GP. "I think this weekend we have learned a lot more about it and we'll take another careful step with it at Hockenheim.

"This weekend we've done a sensible job with the bits we have," he continued, "whereas in Valencia we lost control of the situation, I lost control of the situation in terms of getting the best out of what we had. We could have ditched the system on Friday and gone back to something we knew, but we persevered and that probably cost us some performance in the race.

"We have now got everything working properly so we are not wrapping wishbones in insulation and the sort of stuff we were having to do in Valencia.

"We have those problems solved," he insisted, before adding a note of caution, "touch wood, and hopefully we are able to focus on getting the performance out of the car that's there.

"It's not the fastest car on the circuit," he admitted, "but it's a pretty reasonable car and in Valencia we just didn't get that performance out of it. Here we've made a better job."