McLaren rookie Oscar Piastri says he kept himself out of trouble and "on the good end of things" in Sunday's "crazy" Australian Grand Prix, which allowed him to score his first points in F1.
Piastri spent most of his afternoon just outside the top ten but the chaos that marked the end of the race after the second restart propelled him up to P8 in the event's final classification, the young Aussie completing a double-points finish for his McLaren team.
"Yeah, definitely happy to get my first points on the board, especially here at home," he told the media.
"It was a crazy race, I think it's the first race where I've had three red flags, I think it's probably most people's first race like that. We kept ourselves out of trouble and ended up in the points, it's great!"
Piastri gained three positions at the start and then spared with AlphaTauri's Yuki Tsunoda during the first half of the event, a tussle that he says helped him better his knowledge of deployment and battery usage in the midfield.
"I think the first lap was pretty good, and then in the middle of the race I just got stuck behind Yuki a bit too long," he said.
"I just couldn't really find a way past, then was trying a few different things with the battery to try and use it in the right place.
"There are some things that I can work on there, definitely, but I think once I got past the pace seemed to be pretty good.
"I think for me, there's still some learning to do on how to use the battery most effectively to overtake others."
With Lando Norris finishing the race in sixth position, points for both McLaren drivers in Melbourne were a welcome achievement for the team after its dismal start to its 2023 campaign in Bahrain and in Jeddah.
"Obviously it’s not been a great first two races for the whole team – largely things out of our control," Piastri admitted.
"Some more things out of our control went right today, I guess, to get us into the points.
"But to get this amount of points this early in the year is obviously something we needed; to get points on the board.
"Of course, we’ve got some upgrades coming in Baku and later through the year.
"To get the points on the board with the car that we have at the moment is really good."
"So it was nice to be on the good end of other things going wrong with other people!"
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