Zara Phillips has banished thoughts of pressure as she makes her final preparations with Toytown for the defence of her European Three-Day Event title in Italy next week. “I’m excited at the prospect, but I don’t feel any extra burden,” she said yesterday at Blenheim, where the Great Britain team are fine-tuning their momentum. “I’m just determined to produce a really good performance.”

The Britain squad, which includes three members of the team who won the silver medal at the World Championships last year – Phillips, Daisy Dick with Springalong and Mary King with Call Again Cavalier – had a final dressage workout in the main arena at Blenheim yesterday and will leave for Italy on Monday for their attempt to win a sixth successive European title.

Although delighted with their preparation, Yogi Breisner, the team manager, sounded a note of caution. “We have six good riders all with experienced horses, but it doesn’t help that we have won so many championships in a row – by the law of averages we will have to lose one sooner or later,” he said.

Germany, the world champions, are, as Phillips pointed out, the team to beat. “We have to start well and produce top dressage scores so we rattle them a bit,” she said.

Earlier, Louisa Brassey, 22, had given them a fine example when she and Bruce Rock took the lead at the end of the dressage phase of the Blenheim International Horse Trials in Oxfordshire. Brassey, from Shipton Moyne, Gloucestershire, produced a stylish test to finish a point ahead of Sam Griffiths, of Australia. Tina Cook on Miner’s Frolic, her Gatcombe winner, was a close third.

Brassey, who is trained by Angela Tucker and Wilton Spencer and was the highest-placed young rider at Blenheim last year, was delighted with the performance of the 13-year-old gelding, who returned to competition only recently after suffering a leg injury at Chatsworth in May. “He’s very obedient and very genuine,” she said.

He will have to be if he is to keep the lead today in the cross country, which, with its demanding technical questions and skinny fences, bears the hallmark of its designer, Mike Etherington-Smith. With only ten points separating the top ten riders, the courageous Brassey, who dreams of riding in the Foxhunter Chase at Aintree, cannot afford any mistakes.

Griffiths, who was eleventh at Burghley last week on Connigar Bay, is a noted cross-country rider and was fourth on Happy Times in Le Lion d’Angers, France, last year. A former working pupil of Matt Ryan, the 1992 Olympic champion, Griffiths’s excellent dressage test reflected the training that he has received from Jennie Loriston-Clarke. Blenheim has been his aim for the horse all season, but the gelding is only 8 and, as Griffiths put it: “The course will be a big ask for him.”

Cook is possibly the greatest threat. Miner’s Frolic, owned by Sarah Pelham and Nick and Valda Embiricos, has won his past three one-day events, most recently at Gatcombe last month. Cook, a regular member of the team in the 1990s, regards him as her best horse yet. “He’s good in all three phases – he moves well, is a careful showjumper and is brave across country,” she said.

Realising his ability, Cook, a mother of two, was determined not to hurry the strapping 17.1hh gelding. Their first three-star event was Bramham, West Yorkshire, in June, when he showed his greenness early on but finished well. Cook’s main concern today – with a horse that she hopes may have Olympic potential – is the going, which has become hard in places. “I know they’ve been aerating it, but it’s still unacceptable in places and we’ve asked if more water can be put on certain places overnight,” she said.

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