Does F1's cloud have a silver (Arrows) lining?

Formula 1 is not a sport that likes to spend too much time dwelling on the past. It's all about the next race, the next lap and the next bit of work that can help shave off a couple of tenths of a second.

So while those outside the sport continue to delve into where the blame lies for the Pirelli tyre crisis that F1 has found itself in, those at the centre of it are already focused somewhere else.

Their attention is not on what has happened up until this point, it's on where things go from here. And, more specifically, just who stands to benefit the most from a situation that has, at times, appeared to deliver only losers?

While teams like Force India, Lotus and Ferrari may feel uneasy about the impact of tyre changes on their competitive form - even if they now accept there are genuine safety reasons for doing it - down at Mercedes the feeling is likely to be completely opposite.

For if there is one team that, in the fight to close down Red Bull, stands to benefit the most from tyres that operate at a cooler temperature, it's the Brackley-based squad.

Mercedes's main problem this year has not been tyre wear as such, but about trying to keep its rear-tyre temperatures under control.

The W04 gets it tyres beautifully in to the right operating window - which is why Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg have been so able to exploit the speed of the car on Saturday afternoons.

Tyre dramas will mean changes © LAT

Yet the way the car uses its tyres has not been so good in the races - for when that characteristic pops the rubber over the temperature threshold on Sundays there is very little the drivers can do, other than sit there and get frustrated.

The problem has been particularly difficult to solve because of a unique characteristic of this year's tyres: that once they overheat there is almost nothing that can be done to bring the temperatures back down.

This is a legacy of the much-talked-about steel belt being used inside the tyre. The metal's heat-retention properties means that once the tyres get hot, they stay hot: so if the Mercedes begins abusing its rubber, it's pretty much game over.

The switch to the Kevlar-belt from this weekend's German Grand Prix, with further revisions planned for Hungary, is only going to help cure that heat-retention issue.

For as well as bringing the temperatures of the tyres down by around 10C (potentially from out of the window to in it), the Kevlar internals will make it easier to manage temperature fluctuations - so if things get too hot, action can be taken to bring the tyres down a couple of degrees.

Competitive swings in F1 are also never done in isolation, for any potential gain Mercedes has in this area may also be exaggerated by potential losses that teams like Lotus and Ferrari may have in dropping out the bottom end of the temperature window - especially on single-lap form.

On paper, the stars appear to be lining up nicely.

But even without the potential benefit that may come from the switch of tyres, momentum has been building at Mercedes in other areas too over the past few weeks.

Since its tyre disasters in Bahrain and Spain made it clear just how much work the team needed to devote to this area, its form has lifted dramatically.

In the three races since Barcelona, Nico Rosberg is the highest-scoring driver with 60 points - ahead of Mark Webber on 45 and Sebastian Vettel on 43.

In constructors' championship terms, Mercedes has been the highest-scoring team over that period, too.

Hamilton and Rosberg have delivered 99 points, compared with Red Bull's 88 and Ferrari's 51.

Lotus, the team that everyone feared had the best tyre management after Kimi Raikkonen won in Australia, has managed just 15.

Of course, Mercedes' lift in form is not without its controversies - for rivals are convinced that there is a connection between its improved tyre management and that much talked-about 'private' Pirelli test after the Spanish GP.

Hamilton lost a golden chance to win last weekend © XPB

While the chatter over that will likely only get louder as the championship battle gets more intense, how much Merc did or did not benefit is ultimately irrelevant - for its punishment has been handed down, and it's a simple fact that Mercedes appears to have licked its Sunday afternoon woes.

There may be a slight cost in missing the forthcoming young driver test, and the involvement in the International Tribunal process may have been a distraction, but ultimately the team's penalty was nowhere near as harmful to its title prospects as, say, a race ban or points deduction.

Mercedes has also got its hands on new executive director (technical) Paddy Lowe much earlier than anticipated after a deal was struck with McLaren to release him from his contract.

With Lowe not able to take the team principal role that he is ultimately joining Mercedes for, he's in more of a holding pattern for now - which has left him free to use his supreme technical knowledge to benefit the team's current on-track efforts.

Ross Brawn, who had initially suggested several weeks ago that Lowe was important for the team's long-term prospects, has now emphasised that his new man is focusing almost all his efforts on ramping up the 2013 car.

Make no bones of it: Mercedes has its sights set on the championship.

If it does it - or even just takes the fight with Red Bull and Ferrari all the way to the season finale - we may look back at the British Grand Prix weekend as the most significant moment of its campaign.

For the chaos that engulfed F1 has triggered what could ultimately lead to a performance lift for the team - at the very time that Rosberg and Hamilton proved the team has got its tyre-degradation matters sorted.

Lowe himself admitted before the race that how the team did at Silverstone was going to be critical going forward.

"It is a crucial race for us," he said. "There is still more to understand, I know that, but we are just going to keep chipping away at it. We are hopeful that what we find this weekend will be a turning point..."

There will also be a certain irony that the end result of a tyre crisis, whose roots can be traced back to Lewis Hamilton's spectacular tyre failure in final practice in Bahrain, could well end up helping the very team it hurt the most to start with...

F1 has a funny way of working sometimes.