McLaren's preparations for this weekend's British Grand Prix begun with a day dedicated to pit stop practice. On Monday the team spent the day testing a revised jack, completing the equivalent of sixteen Grands Prix weekends as it road tested its latest development in an effort to eradicate the sort of issues witnessed so many times this season.

"To give you an idea, during a race weekend we'd probably do about fifty pit stops, which include all the practices on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and then the race," explained Sam Michael, the teams Sporting Director.

Speaking during the latest Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Phone-In the Australian was keen to emphasise the progress the team has made during routine tyre changes. "We already had the fastest stationary time in Montreal and then improved that with our best pit stop in Valencia, 2.6 seconds, and we can definitely go further again; there were losses within that loss that we know we can take even more time out.

"Our total pit lane time was four tenths fastest than Ferrari who were the next quickest team," he continued. "Ferrari have generally been four or five tenths quicker than everyone else this year."

However raw pit stop pace is just a by-product, Michael is more concerned with consistency. "Our target is not to have the fastest pit lane stationary time, it's to achieve the fastest average time.

"It's why our internal target is to consistently achieve sub-three second pit stops as an average for all the stops in the race," the former Williams Technical Director said. "Consistency has always been our goal and all the technology that we've added has actually been to add consistency rather than speed."

A new traffic light system, attached wheel nuts and a fast loading jack are all new, their addition largely lost among the consternation surrounding McLaren's pit stops thus far in 2012, at least until Valencia when a jack failure delayed Lewis Hamilton.

"The nature of R&D is you sometimes get things wrong, and that's what happened to us in Valencia with the front jack," Michael explained. "If you look back at the other teams who've introduced some of these items before us they went through similar pain."

Pit stop performance hasn't been restricted to technical development, with attention also given to the mechanics themselves. "Someone likened it to me the other day as like a goal keeper in a football match; it's one of those jobs no-one really cares about until it really matters and then you've got to deliver. So you don't have the ability to win a race, but you most certainly have the ability to lose one.

"We've put a lot of effort in to our people this year with training sessions with the English Institute of Sport, working on our choreography in the pit stop."

The gains made in the pit stops are only part of the picture, with the team aiming to bring notable developments to each race weekend. Silverstone is no different. "We target to bring at least a tenth and we've achieved that throughout the year.

"For Silverstone we've got more than that," he warned. "That comes through a series of aerodynamic and suspension upgrades."

The developments don't come as a knee-jerk response to Red Bull, which dominated the European Grand Prix with Sebastian Vettel before his retirement. Michael believes Vettel's performance was more a result of the German finding the sweet spot with Pirelli's tyres than anything the Milton Keynes team may have found.

"They did take a step forward, but I don't think it's a big as the pace that Sebastian showed," said Michael. "To find a second of a lap in Formula One through changing some fairly secondary parts on the top surface of the floor, which is where we know that they've changed, to get a second a lap in Formula One would be pretty impressive.

"When we arrive in Silverstone we'll find out if that is the case, but I will be pretty surprised if they maintain a second a lap gap."

Indeed it's the closeness of the 2012 field that Michael believes lies at the heart of Jenson Button's woes. The 2009 world champion has been out-performed by teammate Hamilton for most of the season, though the statistics alone fail to tell the full story.

"In Q2 in Valencia from first to thirteenth, so the guys that were trying to get through in to Q3, it was less than three-tenths of a second across thirteen cars," Michael explained. "In days gone past a teammate could be three or four tenths off his teammate and maybe drop one or two places, such was the spread in the field, so the gap from Lewis to Jenson originally hadn't been that great in terms of time, but it's been massive in terms of positions."