Mercedes technical director, James Allison admits that his team's aerodynamicists will take full advantage of the Monaco shots that revealed the RB19's secrets as opposed to its modesty.

Due to the physical nature of the Monaco track, cranes are used in order to remove stricken cars as quickly as possible and reduce the amount of stoppage time.

However, last weekend the crane operators appeared to make more of a meal of the process. Firstly, on Saturday morning, the watching world was given a view of the underside of the Mercedes W14 of Lewis Hamilton after he crashed out, causing Toto Wolff to question whether the crane operator had been recruited from Cirque du Soleil.

"I mean, honestly, I don't even comprehend," sighed the Austrian, as pictures of the car's underside appeared all over social media. "The car was on the road, you could have put it on a truck, rather than showcasing a car to everyone in the world. That was sub-optimum for us, to say the least. Whoever performed the crane has probably worked for Cirque du Soleil."

However, the Austrian got the last laugh when in Q1 it was Sergio Perez who crashed, giving the world a first-hand view of a race winning car.

"It's been a bit of a show-and-tell from all the teams," said Christian Horner. "Everybody has been up in the air at some point. It's the same for everyone. Pictures of floors get taken in and around the paddock, and each team will be employing spy photographers to get pictures of the cars when they are in parts and pieces.

"That's common practice," he admitted, "so I wouldn't have thought it was the first time a picture of the floor has been taken, it's probably the first time it's been suspended from a crane but all teams are always striving for that intelligence."

Indeed so, for James Allison admits that his aerodynamicists will make full use of the imagery.

"It always attracts a lot of interest," he said. "There is a lot of scurrying around with team cameramen, not just to rely on the TV pictures which are low resolution and not good enough grade. Photographers are positioned at strategic parts of the track where there is a likelihood that the cranes will be brought into play and there they are clicking away furiously, and then our inbox is subsequently filled with high-resolution images of other cars. Sadly, our own car had its trip into the heavens and there will be plenty of photos in our competitor's inboxes from that.

"But yes, we got a nice clutch of Red Bull imagery," he smiled, "and that's always a good thing for our aerodynamicists to pore over and see if we can pick out details that will be of interest to us in our ongoing test programme.”

With or without those images, Mercedes development programme is in full swing - no pun intended - as the team hopes to learn more this weekend about the upgrade first introduced in Monaco.

"We will settle back and look at what the Monaco upgrade package has brought us at a more normal track," said the Briton. "But we will also push on in parallel with a whole bunch more things. So there will be a little bit we're bringing to Barcelona and many more things in the races that follow.

"We can't afford to just do everything sequentially," he continued. "Although there's a sort of academic purity to that, it's just too slow way ahead. So the upgrades will keep coming. Hopefully a decent package to build upon what we put on the track in Monaco and we just step forward from here up to the summer break and beyond."

Like Wolff, Allison admits that the very nature of the Monaco track made it nigh impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions so far.

"I would say it's too early to say what their impact will be on the rest of the season because Monaco is such a terribly difficult place to make these sort of judgements at," he explained. "We didn't set the world on fire in qualifying but the car had reasonably tidy race pace and we will wait to find out to see where we truly stand at a more normal track.

"But the drivers seemed to give reasonable feedback about the car. They felt good under braking, the car felt okay. And the data we took off the car off the aerodynamic sensors were not giving us any alarm bells. They were suggesting that things were in line with expectation."