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Brawn happy if Mercedes in top six

Ross Brawn says he will be happy if his Mercedes GP team can qualify in the top six for the Australian Grand Prix, after admitting the team needs to do more to get its package up to speed

With the field looking ultra competitive behind Red Bull Racing duo Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, Brawn thinks there is little separating the chasing pack of Ferrari, Mercedes, Renault and Mercedes.

"We need to be top six I think and then I would be reasonably happy," Brawn told the BBC. "The Red Bulls looked very impressive this morning and we have to think about how we get closer to that.

"But I think there is a gaggle of teams behind that, and whoever does the best job is going to be the next team up. There is a group, Ferrari, McLaren, Renault and us, and whoever does the best job this afternoon will head up the next group."

Brawn says the biggest challenge his team is facing at the moment is getting its KERS working well.

"I think we have a fundamentally good car, but we are having a little bit of a job putting everything together," he said. "This morning was very messy again in terms of our session. There are little glimpses of what the car can do but too many technical problems to realise the best of it.

"There are a lot of new systems on the car this year and they are not all working together at the same time. When they do the car seems pretty reasonable, but again we had some problems this morning. We have got KERS on the car, and other systems, and it's just getting everything to function well at the same time."

He added: "Mercedes has a lot of experience with it [KERS], but we as a team it is our first year with it. We didn't use it in 2009 and that is probably providing the greatest challenge in terms of keeping the systems running consistently."

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