Red Bull had the edge over Mercedes in practice on Thursday, but Lowe says that the opportunity to use the "rest day" for a thorough analysis of tyre data will give the team the chance to bounce back.

"We didn't run the ultrasoft in the Barcelona tests, and we hadn't run it all until Thursday," he said.

"But that's not a terrible omission – running the ultrasoft around Barcelona in February was not particularly representative of what we've seen in Monaco.

"We had new data to consider today compared to last year. Of course it's one thing to have the data, then it's about how you turn it into performance that matters, which brings in the engineering as opposed to just data gathering."

Lowe said the combination of the new Pirelli compound and partial track resurfacing meant that the team had much to learn on Thursday that could not be gleaned from simulations.

"The thing that is difficult to simulate is the tyres and how they interact with the surface.

"This track's been resurfaced quite a lot since last year, probably about half of the track is new tarmac, and you can't predict exactly how that's going to affect the tyres.

"So there's a limit to what you're ever going to learn from a prior simulation, because it's not been calibrated. So you have to go out and do that on the day.

"We've learned that it works. We are still in the process of finding out whether it's a lap one or lap two tyre.

"You'll have seen that there were a number of teams trying different routes on that. It's actually somewhere between the two. The circuit may evolve during the weekend, and it will maybe reach a point of being a lap one tyre.

"Some of the homework will be about getting the best of the tyres – to dig a bit deeper than you can do real time, and understand what we can do on Saturday to get that tyre in the perfect state for that final lap in Q3."

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