• European Grand Prix

Seventh was car's maximum - Rosberg

Nico Rosberg got ahead of Jenson Button at the start of the race but soon lost the position to the faster McLaren © Sutton Images

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• Race:
• European Grand Prix

• Championship:
• FIA Formula One World Championship

• Drivers:
• Ross Brawn
• |
• Nico Rosberg

• Teams:
• Mercedes

Nico Rosberg is confident he got the best out of his Mercedes by finishing seventh at Sunday's European Grand Prix.

"I'm happy with my seventh place today as that is the maximum that we could have achieved and we got everything out of the car," he said.

Rosberg gained a place at the start by beating Jenson Button into turn two, but he couldn't hold the McLaren off for long and finished 38 seconds behind it at the chequered flag.

"It was great to overtake Jenson at the start, and we made the right strategy choice to go for three stops," Rosberg added. "The introduction of DRS was a positive for the race here in Valencia, and we saw some nice overtaking moves. Now we need to keep pushing for our two home races to close the gap to the fastest teams. I'm sure the whole team will work very hard before Silverstone, and I look forward to racing in front of so many people from the team and their families."

Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn agreed that Rosberg maximised the car's potential at Valencia and said some progress was made with its tyre degradation issues.

"Nico achieved the current potential of the car today with another very solid, mistake-free drive," he said. "We couldn't have realistically expected any more and he scored valuable points.

"After our concerns earlier in the weekend, the tyres behaved well and we didn't experience any serious degradation problems, which represents a step forward for us compared to previous races. However, we set our targets very much higher than racing for seventh place: our work in the next weeks will focus on improving the car's performance in order to race with the teams ahead of us."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.