Ross Brawn says Mercedes' current exhaust strategy is the right one

Nico Rosberg reverted to the older specification of exhaust in Austin in a bid to help the team try and getting a better understanding of how its latest car developments were working.

The efforts did not appear to pay off, as both drivers failed to finish in the points for the fifth successive race, despite Michael Schumacher putting in a good showing in qualifying with the Coanda-effect exhausts.

But Brawn is adamant that the most important thing for the team right now is understand car development as a whole, rather than worrying about individual race results.

"We want to get more information," he said. "We are committed to those [Coanda] exhaust systems next year, so we want to understand them.

"We want to consolidate the pluses and reduce the minuses. We want to know how the exhaust gas flows around tyres, the effect it has on the engine, and how different exhaust systems affect things.

"It is all about gathering information for us at this stage, and it is more important we do that than anything else."

Brawn thinks Mercedes' form this season has been affected by a mid-season restructure, the benefits of which are taking some time to come through the system.

"I always believe a successful race car is less about some dramatic new design and more about how you've gone about achieving that design and then maintained the development of that design," he said.

It is about having the team function really well, so the ideas are flowing and the developments are flowing and then the car is maintaining its competitiveness.

"We had a pretty good winter, we started the first half of the season pretty strongly.

"The problem we had was we knew the process we had wasn't strong enough over time.

"We decided to restructure the aero group both in terms of facilities and personnel and that has an impact. If you do it over a winter it upsets the car then, but then if you do it over the summer it affects the development."