Lewis Hamilton believes Mercedes has now caught up with Ferrari after his team took a step forward in performance at recent races.
Ferrari's last victory came at the Monaco Grand Prix in May and since then Mercedes has secured pole position in every qualifying session and won three of the four races. It could have been four wins out of four had it not been for a loose headrest on Hamilton's car at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, and the strong run of form has seen Hamilton close the gap to Vettel in the drivers' championship to just one point.
"I think there are pros and cons between both teams in terms of performance," Hamilton said. "Some weekends they're just a little bit ahead of us, and other weekends [we are ahead of them], so I think it's track dependent.
"At the moment, they've had the strongest package and that's why he's still one point ahead I guess, but I think collectively as a team we are still leading the constructors' championship so I guess we've been gaining points. So it's kind of level.
"But I think this weekend [at Silverstone] we've really been able to exploit the full performance of our car, particularly on both cars, more so than at any other race we've done so far this year. So I think that's a great showing and puts us in a good position, a platform from which to start the second half of the season."
According to Hamilton, a key part of Mercedes' success at recent races has been arriving at circuits with the correct baseline setup. That has allowed him to start building performance from the first practice session rather than struggling to understand how to extract performance from the tyres, and he believes the team's hard work really paid off on Sunday at the British Grand Prix.
"But I think with a lot of work, a lot of analysis, we've really started to move forwards, particularly the last two races, if not three, we've started off immediately on the right foot, which is great. It's great that it happened so soon before the mid-point of the season. Our qualifying pace I think is looking very strong, and our race pace was a lot higher than the Ferraris for probably mostly the first time in the season, so that's really good to see.
"Particularly I think they came with an engine upgrade and we didn't come with any upgrades. It's an exceptional performance this weekend from everyone. The last two races, Valtteri did a great job in Baku and in the last race, but still I don't think collectively as a team we were able to truly reflect the hard work that's been going on in our performance, and I think this weekend that we have."