Mercedes pour cold water on 'tortoise and hare' strategy but keep cards close to chest

Ross Brawn insists Mercedes haven't considered adopting a classic 'tortoise and hare' approach with their frontrow-starting drivers for Sunday's Monaco GP and will simply "see what develops" during the course of the race as they bid to convert pole into race victory at the fourth attempt in 2013.

Cunning team strategy or not, Mercedes are still likely to have to display far better tyre degradation than has habitually become the case on other circuits if they are to claim just their second win since returning to F1 team ownership in 2010. The unique nature of the Monaco circuit, and the fact tyres are exposed to lesser demands around the lap, make it likely that any tyre problems with the W04 won't be as pronounced. Brawn is certainly hopeful the more encouraging long-run pace the team showed in Thursday practice translates to the 78 racing laps on Sunday. "The tyres have certain characteristics and if you exceed the capacity of the tyre then it can deteriorate very quickly. If you don't, if you manage either through the driver or through the car, you can get a lot more life out of it," he explained. "It's not linear so if you go five per cent over the limit and you're over the life of the tyre. So you don't' need to improve by a huge margin to get the tyre back into an open area. We've been in a good place a few times this year and we've been in a bad place a few times this year so it's very difficult to predict what you are going to see on a Sunday. You see trends. I think we did make some progress from what I can judge on Thursday - I think the car was better over a long run. "Whether it's good enough we won't know until tomorrow when we're raced with a race and race conditions and drivers racing each other nose to tail and that will be the measure. But we've put a huge effort in trying to improve the situation and clearly our conversion rate from qualifying to the race is not good enough and that's our priority at the moment." The 2013 Monaco Grand Prix this weekend is live only on Sky Sports F1. Don't miss out, upgrade or subscribe to Sky Sports today or purchase a 24-hour day pass from Now TV